THE BUMBLEBEE AXD THE GARDEN FLOWERS 209 



the food, the queen mother does not do any work but devotes 

 her time to laying eggs so that the colony will be large and strong. 



Late in the summer two things happen in the bumblebee nest. 

 First, so many bees have made caves in bee bread that the nest is 

 full of these cells each one lined with a silk blanket and the busy 

 bee daughters, feeling in "their bones" or somewhere else that 

 autumn and frosts are coming commence filling these empty 

 bee grub caves with honey and sealing them up with as much 

 satisfaction as a woman cans plums and peaches. The reason 

 the bumblebee comb is so irregular instead of being beautifully 

 six-sided cells like that of the honey bee is that the bumblebee 

 grubs in burrowing into the bee-bread just go "even.- which way." 

 Who but a bumblebee anyway would think of storing her honey 

 in a grub-cradle! 



The other thing of importance that happens is that the eggs 

 which the queen lays late in the season hatch into sons and those 

 daughters whose business it will be to be queens next year. The 

 sons are queer helpless chaps. They are better off than the drones 

 of the honeybee because their tongues are long enough so that 

 they can get nectar from flowers; but they have no stings. Or 

 at least the ones we had experience with as children hadn't any. 

 We knew them, or one species of them, for they had white faces 

 instead of black faces like their sisters; and our bravery in catching 

 one of these fellows in our hands was the wonder of our fellows 

 who knew naught of his droneship's incapacity as a fighter. 

 But these sons are given to making excursions and during some 

 of these journeyings they find some queen of their species for a 

 mate. But though the drones come back to the nest and the 

 honey their sisters have stored there, they and their sisters suc- 

 cumb to the cold of winter and only the queens are strong enough 

 to survive. 



The bumblebee is of greater interest to us because of her work in 

 carrying pollen for the flowers in our gardens. It seems as if the 

 flowers await anxiously her coming. Watch her working in the 

 iris, foxglove, lady's slipper, hollyhocks, larkspur, monk's hood, 

 canterbury bells. But especially watch her work in the melon, 

 cucumber and pumpkin blossoms. For there would never be 

 a cucumber or melon orpumpkin for our table if it were not for 

 bees and especially the bumblebees. 



