April, 1921 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE 



223 



behold, the time quickly comes when it 

 nearly fills its cell, whereupon the bees 

 cover it over as with a brown blanket, and 

 leave it in darkness and warm close silence 

 to finish its development. And when some 

 later day it cuts its way out into the crowd- 

 ed restless life of the hive, it is a bee like 

 other bees, head and thorax and abdomen, 

 legs, antennae, wondrous wings. 



In the spring, at the time that our be- 

 ginner is taking his first breathless look in- 

 side a hive, the colony may consist of 10,000 

 bees more or less, probably more. The long 

 winter has seriously reduced its numbers, 

 and now all efforts of the bees and the bee- 

 keeper alike must tend towards bringing it 

 up to its normal summer population of 60,- 

 000 to 70,000 or more. But one amazing 

 thing is that all tlie bees in the hive in 

 early spring are females — one alone wonder- 

 fully and significantly different, the rest all 

 alike. 



Indeed at any season of the year, how- 

 ever large the population of the hive, the 

 great overwhelming majority of them are 

 peculiarly developed females, quite properly 

 known as "workers." The future of the 

 race depends upon their labor, but not at 

 all upon them themselves, in any reproduct- 

 ive sense; for they do not mother it. They 

 are unable to mate and normally lay no eggs. 

 But everything else that is done in this 

 strange bee home, is done by these unresting 

 workers. They feed the ever-hungry larvae; 

 they keep the hive, clean; they stand at the 

 entrance as sentinels, challenging each in- 

 cortiing bee and forbidding the way to ene- 

 mies; concealed in the ends of their bodies 

 are sheathed weapons like poisoned darts, 

 with which they defend the precious home 

 with its babies and its treasure, often yield- 

 ing their lives in the act; with incessant 

 beatings of their wings they ventilate the 

 hive by driving constant currents of air thru 

 it. It is the workers who make the wonder- 

 ful wax for the combs, hanging dense and 

 still while drop by drop exudes from the 

 wax-glands on the lower sides of their 

 bodies, hardening as it strikes the air. It is 

 the workers who flash across the light on 

 tireless wings, who with their long tongues 

 reach the nectar in the flowers, bring it to 

 the hive in special lioney-stomachs, ripen it 

 in innumerable urns, and seal it with the 

 sacred seal. It is tlie workers who collect 

 the pollen, carrying it home in great balls 

 on their legs, as tho in saddle bags. It is the 

 workers who bring in water and who gather 

 strange tree gums, known to beekeepers as 

 propolis, to smooth over rough places in the 

 hive or to glue up cracks (even those the 

 beekeeper doesn't want glued up!). And it 

 is the workers who give of themselves so 

 freely, with such a spendthrift generosity, 

 that in the height of their working season 

 they seldom live more than six weeks. Six 

 weeks of tireless devotion in the sweet- 

 smelling shadowy hive, and of dauntless 

 flight on swift frail wings thru sunlight to 



distant flowers — and they are gone — faith- 

 ful wings ragged and worn. Six weeks of 

 song, blended of eagerness and content — 

 and they are silent, forever. 



The one strangely different individual (in 

 the spring the only bee in the hive besides 

 the thousands of workers) is also a female, 

 yet utterly different from the workers. Her 

 long beautiful body contains the hope of 

 the race, for she and she alone, in each hive, 

 is the mother of all the rest. Beekeepers, 

 more happily than logically, call her 

 "queen." Tho she by no means rules the 

 hive, yet the circled retinue of workers al- 

 ways around her and their ajiparently ten- 

 der care of her make the term gracefully 

 appropriate. She performs none of theii- 

 tasks, lacking the physical equipment for 

 honey-gathering and pollen-bearing and 

 wax-secretion. When a queen is about a week 

 old, she makes one dizzy nuptial flight up. 

 up, up into the glorj' of sunlit spaces. Then 

 mated and matronly, she settles quietly 

 down to her appointed destiny of egg-laying 

 In cell after cell she deposits the ivory- 

 white eggs, until thousands and thousands 

 of bees have emerged, while thousands of 

 others lie in their covered cells, or in open 

 ones, still being fed; and still she lays on. 

 Sometimes at the height of her laying period 

 she may lay two or three thousand eggs a 

 day. But never again, unless in company 

 with some future swarm, will she know the 

 rapture of wings and sunshine. In the dusky 

 hive, she may live several years, while her 

 multitudinous families of shorter-lived sun- 

 loving children flit thru their little day and 

 disappear. 



One of tlie wonders of the queen, too, is 

 that some of these very same eggs that de- 

 velop into unnumbered workers may, merely 

 by tlie use of a larger cell and a difference 

 in the feeding during the larval stage, be 

 developed into other queens, who, mating, 

 become themselves mothers of teeming 

 hives. And another wonder is that in later 

 s])ring and summer the queen lays, in addi- 

 tion to these female-producing eggs (and in 

 far lesser number), eggs that produce males. 



Male bees are known as "drones." They 

 do no work at all. They don 't even defend 

 the hive. They are made that way, tho; they 

 haven't even a sting. They arc big-bodied — 

 coarse-looking — heavy feeders. They have 

 immense eyes that meet on top of their 

 heads and strong powerful wings. The 

 drone exists for one purpose only; in the 

 act of achieving this by mating with a 

 young queen in mid-air, he dies. Unless re- 

 strained by a wise beekeeper, every hive i 

 produces these honey-consuming undesira- 

 bles with a strangely unnecessary prodigal- 

 ity. Then, as the honey flow declines, they ' 

 are relentlessly disposed of. The workers at- | 

 tack them bodily or drive them from the j 

 hive or refuse them entrance wlien they ' 

 come swaggering back, gay and carefree, i 

 from some romp in the summer sun. Thus 

 perish the drones. 



