226 



SYSTEMATIC ZOOLOGY 



The true honey bees make their nests in hollow trees, or when 

 domesticated in artificial hives. There the workers, which again 

 are sexually immature females, make the hexagonal cells of wax 

 for the development of the larvae and for storing the food supply 

 of honey. All the eggs are laid by one female, the queen, who 

 sometimes lays more than three thousand in a single day, and 

 as many as a million in the course of a year. The eggs which 

 are to develop into male bees or drones are unfertilized, and they 

 are few, for the drones exist only shortly after coming out of the 

 pupal stage, when the bees swarm and the queen is fertilized 

 and a new colony is started ; any drones still living in the hives 

 in the autumn are killed by the workers, who alone with the 

 queen live through the winter. The workers generally live only 

 a number of months ; the queen may live four or five years, and 

 if the queen in a colony is accidentally killed or lost, a larva des- 

 tined to become a worker may be made to develop into a queen 

 by being fed with a particularly rich food supply by the workers. 



The relation between the orders of the condensed classifica- 

 tion just given and of the more extended classification will be 

 seen from the following table : — 



( '.< I\l I] \M I I Cl \SSII |C \ III l\ 

 ( )r,ler 



1. Thysanura 



II. Pseudoncuroptera 



III. Orthoptera 



IV. Hemipteni 



V. Neuroptera 



VI. Lepidoptera 



VII Diptera . 



VIII. Coleoptera 



IX. Hymenoptera 





