72 DISCOVERY CH. 



foods while in their larval state. The future queen is 

 fed on " chyle food " by the nurses until it assumes 

 the chrysalis change, from which it emerges a perfect 

 female. The future worker is weaned upon the 

 fourth day, and fed henceforth on honey and digested 

 pollen, with the result that it remains an undeveloped 

 female. 



This wonderful history of the hive-bee represents the 

 results of work done by naturalists of many countries 

 and at different times. There have been hundreds of 

 practical bee keepers from ancient to modern times, 

 but they have contributed almost nothing to this know- 

 ledge of the structure and functions of the complicated 

 social community of a hive ; and for the actual fact we 

 have to go to Butler, Bonnet, Swammerdam, Reaumur, 

 Huber, Dzierzon, and other inquiring naturalists whose 

 names are unfamiliar not only to general readers but 

 also to a large part of the scientific world. 



Three hundred years ago little was known of the 

 transformation which insects undergo from the egg to 

 the fly emerging from the larval skin. Harvey, the 

 discoverer of the circulation of the blood, was so far 

 mistaken as to teach that insects were generated by 

 chance, and that the change from a pupa to the winged 

 form was a transmutation like that of a base metal into 

 gold, or the flying nymph of Ovid into a laurel tree. He 

 regarded the pupa as an egg ; and even now the pupae 

 of ants are popularly called ants' " eggs." Swammer- 

 dam persistently pointed out the errors of this belief, 

 and by his studies disposed of it completely. He proved 

 that all the parts of an insect are beneath the larval 

 skin long before the insect emerges ; that, in fact, the 

 larva or pupa is not transmuted into a butterfly but is 

 the butterfly itself in another form. 



