6 4 



PRACTICAL ZOOLOGY 



are used for rearing the young and storing honey. Honey is not 

 collected from flowers, but is manufactured from the nectar of 

 flowers. Worker bees lap up the nectar with their tongues and 

 suck it into a honey sac within the body, where it is stored until 

 they return to the hive. Then the nectar is disgorged into the 

 wax cells and left until all but eighteen to twenty per cent of the 

 water contained in it has evaporated. The cell is then sealed 



with a cap of wax. The flavor 

 of honey depends upon the 

 kind of flowers visited by the 



Fig. 40. — Worker honeybees. 

 A, removing wax scale ; B, carrying pollen. (After Casteel.) 



bees. In a single season a hive of bees will produce about 

 thirty pounds of comb honey, which nets the bee keeper from 

 ten to fifteen cents per pound. 



Among the other duties of the worker bees, besides those of 

 building honeycomb and manufacturing honey, are the cleaning 

 of the hive, ventilating the hive, guarding the hive, carrying 

 water to the hive for the young in warm weather, feeding the 

 young, and gathering pollen (Fig. 40, B). Pollen grains are 

 the very small fertilizing elements in flowers. Pollen is gathered 

 by the legs of the workers (p. 27, Fig. 12), stored in wax cells, 

 and furnishes the principal food of the larva?. Bees swarm in 

 early summer, when the hive is in danger of overcrowding. 

 The workers rear a second queen when the hive becomes 

 crowded, and the old queen then leaves the hive with a few 

 thousand workers and founds a new colony. 



