208 NATURE-STUDY REVIEW [14:5— May, 1918 



What the bumblebee queen usually wants to find is the deserted 

 nest of a field mouse which she. will proceed to lease forthwith — 

 since it gives her just the kind of a house she likes. But if she 

 does not find it she will accommodate herself somewhere else. 

 She sometimes takes a rotting fence rail and one year one of our 

 ambitious queens hunted higher and took possession of a tile 

 nest in which we fondly hoped a pair of chickadees would set up 

 house keeping. 



After she has found a place to live, she starts straightway to 

 making loaves of bread; a bread that would suit Mr. Hoover 

 because it is made entirely of substitutes. For flour she gathers 

 pollen from the early flowers and for mixing she uses some nectar. 

 It is a sweet bread that she molds into a big irregular loaf. But 

 this bread isn't for her own selfish uses — it is food for the family 

 that is to be. For when she gets a loaf large enough, she lays an 

 egg here and another one there upon it. Then she gathers more 

 pollen, a hard and taxing toil for such a big clumsy bee and makes 

 more sweet bread and upon it lays more eggs. 



The youngster that hatches from one of these eggs is a little 

 creamy white bee grub, looking as little like her queen mother as 

 an angleworm looks like an oriole; but she is her mother's true 

 daughter just the same and a knowing one too — for she at once 

 begins eating the bee bread and makes a little cave for herself 

 by eating all that she digs, just as a boy would make a cave in a 

 sponge cake if it were as large as a house. By and by she has 

 eaten her fill and shed her skin several times like all young insects, 

 and has reached her full growth. Then she spins about herself, 

 from her own little spindle which is very near her mouth, the most 

 beautiful and delicate silken blanket that ever covered an insect; 

 and rolled snugly in this she takes a long rest while her legs and 

 wings are growing. After a week or so she sheds her pupa skin 

 and crawls out, a damp but perfect bumblebee. She is not so 

 large as her queen mother and that is well, for she has a special 

 business to accomplish. All the eggs laid by the queen in the 

 spring hatch into daughters, because daughters are needed to 

 help in getting the food and caring for the young bees; the chief 

 work being the gathering of pollen and nectar and making many 

 loaves of bee-bread, because the bumblebee babies can take care 

 of themselves if they only have a loaf of sweet bread to burrow 

 in. After her eldest daughters takes the responsibilities of getting 



