HYMENOPTERA. l6l 



will divide the community into swarms, one for each 

 queen surviving. Sometimes the workers interfere in a 

 possible battle of the queens and kill either the old or the 

 new queen by gathering in a tight ball about her and 

 suffocating her. The sting of the worker is rarely, if ever, 

 used against the queen; and the queen does not use her 

 sting save in one of these battles royal against one of her 

 rivals. The matter having been settled, the diminished 

 community in the hive sets about the work of building 

 up another community, while the exiled swarms do the 

 same elsewhere. It usually comes about in the case of the 

 exiled swarms that some one sees the swarm hanging to 

 a tree branch and uses his diligence to secure it and put 

 it into another hive ; but occasionally one of these swarms 

 escapes and makes itself a nest in some tree and the bees 

 become wild again, as they were originally. 



With the bumblebees, at the end of the summer, the 

 nest is abandoned; none stays in it. The old queen 

 mother, the drones, and the workers die, leaving the young 

 queen to winter through in some sheltered situation. 

 Such colonies are not permanent, nor do they tend 

 strongly toward the persistence or the spread of the species. 

 Among the honeybees, the many generations of workers 

 hatched during the summer season, the providing of the 

 overstocked hive with several queens, and the swarmings 

 incident to the growth of such a brood colony tend 

 directly toward the persistence of the bee kind through 

 the spread of enormous numbers of them. Our hive 

 honeybees are all of European stock; the native bees are 

 the familiar bumblebees; while our wild bees are swarms 

 of the domesticated sorts which have escaped from the 

 artificial hive to the wild life again, where they build their 

 comb of wild honey in some hollow tree. The swarming 



