184 THE BEE-KEEPER’S MANUAL. 
joint of their hind legs, where, as was above pointed 
out, it is often mistaken for wax. The powder 
or meal thus conveyed into the hive is by other bees 
afterwards kneaded up into paste, and stored for use 
in the worker cells, adjoining those containing brood. 
To preserve it from the air, a small portion of honey 
is pat on the top of each cell, coated over with wax. 
Thus prepared, it is a very heavy substance; and 
this often leads to a false estimate of the value of a 
hive, for the annual collection of pollen has been 
variously estimated at thirty to one hundred pounds 
in a single family. 
Naturalists are pretty well agreed that the store of 
pollen or farina is used (with a mixture of honey and 
water) chiefly for feeding the larve; though a 
portion of such compound may form, occasionally, the 
sustenance of the bees themselves. It appears 
established, indeed, that without partaking of pollen 
they are unable to transform the honey they have 
eaten into wax. Mr. Cheshire speaks of pollen as 
constituting the flesh-forming nutriment, and honey 
as the heat-forming; and this view, of course, 
corresponds with the fact of the former being needed 
chiefly by.the growing grubs, next by the queen (see 
page 13) to repair the waste of laying, and least of 
all by the full-grown workers, and that chiefly at a 
time when they are about to undergo a temporary 
loss of substance (though we are told by Von Ber- 
lepsch that they also resort to it daily—as a sort of 
tonic, we may suppose—for some time after the close 
of the working season). It is stated, however, that the 
nurse-bees supply digested pollen to the drones as 
