202 SCIENCE REMAKING THE WORLD 



which soon hatch wasp grubs that are fed by her with 

 chewed-up insects until the grubs pupate. After a few 

 days they issue as worker wasps (infertile females), 

 which immediately enlarge the nest, and make more 

 cells in which the queen lays more eggs. The grubs 

 hatching from these eggs are fed by the workers, and by 

 repeating this performance the family grows by the end 

 of the summer into a community of many hundreds of 

 active wasps. But in the autumn, after males and 

 females have been produced to mate and provide fertil- 

 ized females (queens) to start new families in the next 

 spring, the old queen and workers die and the com- 

 munity breaks up. 



The honey-bees take a great step forward, for their 

 communities do not regularly break up each year, but 

 go on continuously for an indefinite period occasionally 

 budding off new communities ("swarming")- Each 

 community, too, may, and in the course of time al- 

 ways does, contain individuals produced by different 

 queens, for whenever new queens are produced, which 

 happens each year, it is sometimes the old queen that 

 goes out with the swarm, leaving the new queen to 

 produce new individuals in the hive. 



There is, too, in the honey-bee community much more 

 differentiation as regards the work done in the com- 

 munal home than in the social wasp and bumble-bee 

 communities, and this work is much more varied in 

 character. At any given time in the honey-bee com- 

 munity some workers will be acting as nurses for the 

 larval bees, some as pollen and nectar gatherers, some 

 as wax-makers and comb-builders, some as cleaners, 



