BEES AND REE CULTURE. 1135 



His mental energy must also keep him, by aid of the admirable 

 periodicals, fully abreast of all the latest discoveries and inven- 

 tions which bear on his business. Most important of all, he 

 must be prompt to do the work of the apiary exactly on time. 

 Neglect is the cause of nearly all the failures in apiculture. 

 With but few bees we may be successful and have some regu- 

 lar business besides our bees ; but we must be sure that when 

 our bees need our care and attention that they surely have it. 



Natural History of Bees. In every colony of bees 

 there are, in mid-summer, a queen, a few hundred drones, and 

 several thousand workers. 



The Queen is the only fully developed female in the hive. 

 She lays all the eggs, and has no other function. The queen 

 (Fig. 1) is long and tapering, her mouth 

 parts weak, her wings short, her sting 

 curved, and her posterior legs without the 

 pollen-baskets of the worker bees. She is 

 much longer and slimmer than, either the 

 drones or workers, and though not as large FIG. I.-QUEKN BEE.* 

 as the drones, she is a little larger than the workers, so that an 

 aperture that will just permit a worker to pass, three-sixteenths 

 of an inch, will effectually blockade both queen and drones. 



The queen's abdomen is long and plump, as it contains the 

 many tubed ovaries in which grow the thousands of eggs. The 

 queen of ted lays as many as two or three thousand eggs a day. 

 The eggs pass from the ovaries through a tube the oviduct. 

 On the side of this (Fig. 2) is a sack, the spermatheca, which 

 contains the sperm-cells which were received from the drone 

 when mating took place. It is estimated that this sack some- 

 times holds one thousand million sperm-cells. 



The queen is developed in a special cell (Fig. 26), which 

 looks much like a thimble or peanut. This is usually built on 

 the edge of the comb, extends downward, and is much larger 

 than the other cells. The cell, in natural swarming, receives an 

 egg directly from the queen. In case a queen is killed or re- 

 moved the bees will build a queen cell about a worker larva of 

 some age, and thus hasten the advent of a queen, though pre- 



*The illustrations in this article are from Cook's Bee Keeper't Guide. 



