CHAPTER IX 
THE SOVEREIGN WORKER-BEE 
ATCHING the inner life of the hive in 
the season of its full activity, it is not the 
untiring spirit of industry pervading the 
whole bee-commonwealth that most excites the 
student’s wonder, but rather the fact that this 
ceaseless diligence finds so many outlets—that so 
many, different kinds of necessary work are going 
forward at one and the same time. 
Between the brood-combs the nurses are feeding 
the young larva, or clearing out the empty cells, 
or sealing over the full-grown nymphs for their 
pre-natal slumber. Hard by, the sowers are at 
their vital work, driving their living seed-barrow, 
the queen, over the combs. Elsewhere the wax- 
makers hang in a silent, densely packed cluster. 
Overhead, the new honey-combs are growing ; 
the masons building up the cell-walls, while the 
engineers devise means and ends, calculate strains, 
put in a strut here, a stay there, or flying buttress 
from one comb to another, or cut new passage- 
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