INTERRELATIONS OF INSECTS 



munity. Though hibernating workers live eight or nine months, the 

 other workers live but from five to twelve weeks. 



The term queen is, of course, a misnomer, for the government of 

 the hive is anything but monarchical. The chief duties of the queen, 

 or mother, are simply to lay eggs and to lead away a swarm. She is able 

 to deposit as many as 4,000 eggs in twenty-four hours. After a single 

 mating, the spermatozoa retain their vitality in the spermatheca of the 

 queen for three or four years the lifetime of a queen. The males, or 

 drones, apart from their occasional sexual usefulness, are of little or no 

 service, and their very name has become an expression for laziness. 



The Comb. Wax, of which the comb is built, is made from honey or 

 sugar, many pounds (twenty, according to Huber) 

 of honey being required to make one pound of 

 wax. The workers, gorged with nectar, cling to 

 one another in a dense heated mass until the white 

 films of wax appear underneath the abdomen (Fig. 

 102); these are transferred to the mouth, 

 as described on page 211, and are masti- 

 cated with a fluid, secreted by cephalic 

 glands, which alters the chemical composition of 

 the wax and makes it plastic. 



The workers now contribute their wax to form 

 a vertical, hanging septum, on the opposite sides of 

 which they proceed to bite out pits the bottoms 

 of the future cells using the excavated wax in 

 making the cell walls. The bottom of each cell 

 consists of three rhombic plates (Fig. 282, ^4), and 

 the cells of one side interdigitate with those of the 

 other side (Fig. 282, B) in such a way that each rhomb serves for two 

 cells at once. Wax is such a precious substance that it is used (in- 

 stinctively, however) always with the greatest economy; the cell walls 

 are scraped to a thinness of Y *TF or 4^ of an inch, and nowhere is 

 more wax used than is sufficient for strength; one pound of wax makes 

 from 35,000 to 50,000 worker cells. The cells, at first circular in cross 

 section, become hexagonal from the mutual interference of workers on 

 opposite sides of the same wall; the form, however, is by no means a 

 regular hexagon in the mathematical sense, for it is difficult to find a 

 cell with errors of less than 3 or 4 degrees in its angles (Cheshire). 

 Worker cells are one fifth of an inch in diameter, while the larger cells, 

 destined for drones or to hold honey, are one quarter of an inch across. 



FIG. 282. A, Bases 

 of comb cells; B, section 

 of comb. Somewhat en- 

 larged. After CHESHIRE. 



