168 The Bee People. 
I shall have to tell you the secret. 
They bottle themselves up! You remem- 
ber how the Apis baby, in its pretty waxen 
cell, spun a silk nightcap when it was 
capped over? Baby Bombus spins a whole 
nightgown. 
She eats a hole in the pollen about her, 
large enough to lie in comfortably, then she 
begins to spin, and does not stop until she 
has made for herself a yellow cocoon. It 
looks a little like the cocoon of a silkworm, 
only it is much darker in color, and the 
lower part is embedded in pollen. The 
upper part is sometimes quite clean and 
pretty. 
I looked into the nest of the bombus 
with a yellow jacket and a yellow band 
across the upper end of her abdomen, and 
this is what I saw. Just a pile of cocoons, 
