THE HONEYBEE AND OTHER SOCIAL ANIMALS 307 



Fig. 243. — The honey-bee, Apis mellifica; 



Ay queen; B, drone; 

 specimens.) 



C, worker. (From 



A honey-bee community is made up of three kinds of in- 

 dividuals (fig. 243), namely, a single queen or mother which 

 lays the eggs from which all the other bees are produced, 

 several hundred drones or males, one of which becomes 

 the royal consort, 

 fertilizing the eggs, 

 and from ten to forty 

 thousand or more 

 workers, which do 

 all the work of the 

 community, gather- 

 ing food, making 

 wax, building comb, 

 ventilating the hive 

 and caring for the 

 young bees. The 

 drones are larger, 

 more robust, and more hairy than the workers, while 

 the queen is longer, with a slender tapering abdomen. 

 Certain combs are chosen as brood-combs (fig. 244), 

 and beginning in the center of these and working out- 

 ward the queen lays a tiny white elongate egg in the 

 bottom of each cell. These eggs hatch in three days, and 

 the young bees or larva; appear as white, soft, footless, 

 helpless, grubs. They are fed by certain worker bees 

 called nurses (workers which have not yet learned to go 

 out and gather pollen and honey), at first on a highly 

 nutritious substance called bee-jelly, which the nurses 

 make in their stomachs and regurgitate. After two or 

 three days of bee-jelly diet they are given pollen and 

 honey. A few days later a small mass of this new food 

 is put into each cell, which is then " capped " or covered 

 with wax. The larvae after eating what is stored in their 

 cell change into pupae and lie quiescent for thirteen days 

 when they become fully developed bees. They now 



