THE INHABITANTS OF THE HIVE.—Chapter VII. 
It is well for the beginner to remember that, as the queen is, so is the 
whole colony. Her blood is the blood of all the members of the hive, and 
the faults of her strain will be the faults of her progeny. So it is all- 
important that the colony have a good queen mother. 
The Drone. 
The drone, or male bee, has no other business within the hive or out- 
side of it than to fertilize the queen. He is hatched from an infertile egg, 
as before explained. His development requires 3 days in the egg, 6% 
days as a larva and 14% days as a pupa sealed in the cocoon—24 days in all. 
During the first three days of the larva stage, the drone is fed rich larval 
food, but after that period is fed a coarser food probably composed largely 
of pollen and honey. He has no organs for gathering nectar or secreting 
wax; he has no sting, and does no work for his own support or the support 
of the colony, living entirely on the toil of the workers. He is shorter, 
thicker and heavier than the queen, and larger and clumsier than the work- 
ers. His wings extend the whole length of his body. He excels other 
members of the hive family only in the noise that he can make, his buzzing 
when on the wing being very loud and apparently very satisfactory to 
himself. 
Drones are produced in larger numbers than is seemingly necessary, as 
probably only one in many hundreds of them finds a queen and mates with 
her; but it seems necessary for the colony to have an abnormally large 
number of them in order that the queen may very certainly be mated 
within a short time after she leaves the hive on her nuptial flight. That 
the drone may discover a queen in flight at long distance he has, perhaps, 
the finest compound eyes known to science, having more than 25,000 facets 
in each of these two eyes, besides having three common eyes (probably for 
short-range vision) that may be seen on the triangle at the top of: his head. 
If he mates with a queen he loses his life at once in the act, If he survives 
the main honey flow and mating season, he is not permitted to continue a 
useless burden on the colony, but is refused food, and is ruthlessly but eco- 
nomically pushed out of the hive by his sisters, to starve to death in a 
friendless, outside world. But in case the colony for any reason has to 
raise a new queen, the drones are kept till this new queen is fertilized. 
The Workers. 
The worker bee (an imperfect female) does the hard work of the 
hive. She is developed from a fertilized egg in the smallest cells of the 
combs. In three days’ time the egg hatches into 
a tiny larva and for three days this is abundantly 
supplied with rich larval food by the young nurse 
bees, after which a coarser food containing pol- 
len and honey is fed. Under this care it grows 
with astonishing rapidity. In about three days 
from the time the egg hatches, the larva is so 
large that it almost completely fills the bottom of 
the cell. In another three days it stretches out Eges in the cells. 
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