142 Beekeeping 



must take place to permit her to produce the large number 

 of eggs which she lays in the height of her activities. The 

 larvae, as has been explained in the previous chapter, take 

 enormous quantities of food, given them by the worker 

 bees, permitting the rapid growth during the short period 

 of larval development. 



The food of the various members of the colony all comes 

 from nectar and pollen. The workers eat honey and pollen 

 for their own nourishment but modify the raw materials 

 before feeding the larvae. They also normally feed the 

 queen and the drones, but the composition of the material 

 furnished is not determined. That the raw materials may 

 serve their purpose, they must be so modified that they 

 may pass through the walls of the alimentary canal and 

 then remain in a soluble condition in the blood until taken 

 up by the tissues. To accomplish this, various digestive 

 enzymes are needed. The source of these will be discussed 

 later. 



The digestive processes of the bee are not thoroughly 

 understood. The usual discussions, which are abundantly 

 numerous in spite of our lack of knowledge, are too often 

 confined to the drawing of analogies with human digestion. 

 No such analogies are permissible and it is, for example, 

 entirely unwarranted to apply the name "chyle stomach" 

 to the ventriculus, because of a supposed homology with 

 human intestinal digestion. The whole structure of the 

 insect alimentary canal is different from that of man and it 

 is, in fact, better not to apply names to any of the parts 

 which are drawn from human anatomy. It is perhaps per- 

 missible to use the terms mouth, oesophagus and anus for 

 both insects and man, but to call the ventriculus the chyle 

 stomach or the rectal ampulla the large intestine is mislead- 

 ing. These parts do not seem to have homologous func- 

 tions in man and bees. 



The structure of the alimentary canal has been well 

 described by Snodgrass and by other workers and in so 

 far as a knowledge of anatomy is helpful there is little room 



