HYMENOPTERA OR BEES, ANTS, WASPS, ETC. 63 



the simple family there are various gradations to the primi- 

 tive social community such as that formed by the common 

 bumble bees. Here the queen, which is the only member 

 to survive the winter, starts a nest during the spring 

 in a hole or some depression in the earth, which she often 

 covers over by bits of moss or grass. Then she makes 

 a few waxen cells, stores them with honey and pollen, 

 and lays in them eggs which hatch into worker bees. The 

 workers are of relatively small size, but otherwise in 

 appearance they are very similar to the queen. They 

 busy themselves with making new cells, 

 storing .them with honey and pollen, 

 and feeding the young grubs. Later 

 in the season queens and drones ap- 

 pear; the queens after becoming ferti- 

 lized scatter, and those that survive the 

 winter found new colonies in the follow- 

 ing year. 



The bumble bee community is not 



J FIG. 54. Nest of 



a permanent one, but the transitory the solitary burrow- 

 product of a single season. In its J^.J^fi!* 1 '' 

 household arrangements, as in many 

 other respects, it is simple and crude compared with the 

 social life of the hive bees; the wax cells are rounded 

 capsules arranged in no very definite order, and there is 

 only one kind of cell produced. The queen at first, as in 

 the solitary bees, performs all the labors of making a nest 

 and rearing young, and only later devotes herself exclu- 

 sively to laying eggs. Division of labor is not carried very 

 far and the castes are specialized only to a slight extent. 

 There are other bees whose social life is more complex than 

 that of the bumble bees; they form connecting stages be- 

 tween the latter and the hive bees whose social arrange- 



