64 AGRICULTURE OF MAINE. 



in the forest, and since we domesticated them they Hve in the 

 hives which we make for them. 



This is a very interesting section from a bee hive. You see 

 here a great brood of worker cells and along here a great row 

 of queen cells. We have found that after we have had a hive 

 of bees two or three years the queen wears out. She gets old, 

 she cannot lay eggs as rapidly as she did once, so we have to 

 take out the old queen and put in a new one. For this reason 

 we have men who make it their chief business to grow queens. 

 They cut out these queen cells, put them up to the top of the 

 hive where the temperature is constant, and move them along 

 gradually, and then these little bees feed them royal jelly. 

 They take them out gradually and sometimes they can produce 

 as many as three hundred queens in one season from a single 

 hive. You will see that the comb cells are larger for the drones 

 than for the workers. Here you liave drone cells used for 

 the storage of honey. That recalls to my mind a very interest- 

 ing story. It is found by bee-keepers that when bees lack 

 room in the hive they store the honey in the drone cells ; these 

 being larger hold more honey, and it is said that the bees 

 reason that out and show wisdom thereby. But such is not 

 the case. They use these larger drone cells for the simple 

 reason that you, when you are in a crowd and excited, will do 

 things which you would not do when you are alone or when 

 you are with the members of your family; that is, they fall back 

 on some old way of doing. Here you have the queen cells 

 shown in their characteristic grouping. It has been found that 

 the queen bees need to be cared for every moment by the 

 worker bees. And so you see the queen bee in the center, 

 larger than the worker bees and surrounded by them. They 

 follow every movement she makes. They go wherever she 

 goes. They guard, protect and keep her clean. Of course she 

 is wandering over the cells here, laying eggs in them. How 

 does she know when to lay an egg which will produce a drone 

 and when to lay an egg which will produce a worker? Well, 

 I don't think she knows very much about it. She lays an egg 

 which will produce a drone, which is a fertili/^ed egg, she lays 

 an egg which will produce a worker, when she comes to a cell 

 of a certain size, and I think that is all there is about it. She 

 is an egg-laying machine in the truest sense of the word. 



