MUTUAL AID AND COMMUNAL LIFE 



429 



no more work except that of egg-laying. From these new 

 eggs are produced more workers, and so on until the com- 

 munity may come to be pretty large. Later in the summer 

 males and females are produced and mate. With the 

 approach of winter all the workers and males die, leaving 

 only the fertilized females, the queens, to live through the 

 winter and found new communities in the spring. 



Honeybees live together, as we knov/, in large communities. 

 We are accustomed to think of honeybees as the inhabitants 

 of beehives, but there were bees before there were hives. 

 The "bee tree" is famil- 

 iar to many of us. The 

 bees, in Nature, make 

 their home in the hollow 

 of some dead tree trunk 

 and carry on there all 

 the industries which 

 characterize the busy 

 communities in the hives. 



These industries and 

 indeed the whole life of 

 a honeybee community 

 are so interesting and 

 informing and withal so 

 readily studied in any schoolroom that I give in the fol- 

 lowing pages some detailed directions and suggestions for 

 a careful school study of the life of this fascinating insect. 



The life of a honeybee^— In studying the life of the 

 honeybees one must observe them in the hive as well as 

 in the field. It is therefore highly desirable to have an 

 "observation" hive (fig. 219), i.e., one made with glass 

 sides and glass top, covered with outer wooden sides which 

 are swung on hinges like doors, and with the usual removable 

 wooden roof. Ordinarily the wooden sides and top are 

 closed, thus leaving the hive in darkness. However, when 



Fig. 217. Diagrams of nest-burrows of 

 short-tongued mining-bees. B , nest of 

 Andrena; A, compound nest of 

 Halictus. 



