390 EVOLUTION AND ANIMAL LIFE 



will tear down several cells around some single one, and enlarge 

 this inner one into a great irregular vase-shaped cell. When 

 the egg hatches, the grub or larva is fed bee jelly as long as it 

 remains a larva, never being given ordinary pollen and honey 

 at all. This larva finally pupates, and there issues from the 

 pupa not a worker or drone bee, but a new queen bee. The egg 

 from which the queen is produced is the same as the other eggs, 

 but the worker nurses by feeding the larva only the highly 

 nutritious bee jelly make it certain that the new bee shall be- 

 come a queen instead of a w^orker. It is also to be noted that 

 the male bees or drones are hatched from eggs that are not 

 fertilized, the queen having it in her power to lay either ferti- 

 lized or unfertilized eggs. From the fertilized eggs hatch 

 larvse which develop into queens or workers,- depending on 

 the manner of their nourishment; from the unfertilized eggs 

 hatch the males.. 



When several queens appear there is much excitement 

 in the community. Each community has normally a single 

 one, so that when additional queens appear some rearrange- 

 ment is necessary. This rearrangement comes about first by 

 fighting among the queens until only one of the new queens is 

 left alive. Then the old or mother queen issues from the hive 

 or tree follow^ed by many of the workers. She and her followers 

 fly away together, finally alighting on some tree branch and 

 massing there in a dense swarm. This is the familiar phenome- 

 non of "swarming." The swarm finally finds a new hollow 

 tree, or in the case of the hive bee the swarm is put into a 

 new hive, where the bees build cells, gather food, produce 

 young, and thus found a new community. This swarmmg 

 is simply an emigration, which results in the wider distribu- 

 tion and in the increase of the number of the species. It is a 

 peculiar but effective mode of distributing and perpetuating 

 the species. 



There are many other interesting and suggestive things 

 which might be told of the life in a bee community: how the 

 community protects itself from the dangers of starvation 

 when food is scarce or winter comes on by killing the useless 

 drones and the immature bees in egg and larval stage; how 

 the instinct of home-finding has been so highly developed 

 that the worker bees go miles aw^ay for honey and nectar, 

 flying with unerring acciu-acy back to the hive; of the extraor- 



