2 Bee-Keeping Simplified for the 
In the summer the honey bec community is made up of three 
kinds—one queen, forty to fifty thousand workers, and a few 
hundred drones, Fig. 1. : ; 
The Queen is the most important bee in the hive, not 
because she rules, which might be imphed from ler name, 
but because she is a fully developed female, capable of 
impregnation by the male, after which she can reproduce 
Fig. 1. 
either sex by laying eggs, which, at will, she either fertilises 
with spermatozoa originally obtained from the drone and 
stored in a little sac at the base of her abdomen, or she 
allows them to pass unfertilised. 
In size and appearance the egg is very like a fly-blow, 
Fig. 2, left side. Enclosed: within the shell is a yolk and 
white as with the hen’s egg. In the centre of the end, Fig. 2, 
right side, is a little hole called the micropyle, through which 
—!_ 
Wie. 2. 
the spermatozoa enters. The fertilised ege produces the 
females (workers or queens), the unfertilised produce drones 
only. 
Occasionally, under abnormal conditions of queenlessness, a 
worker develops the power of laying eggs; these are un- 
fertilised, and produce only males. 
In appearance the qucen is quite different from the other 
bees. The abdomen is more slender and tapering, the wings 
