162 THE HONEY-BEE. 



bee emerges. The freshly emerged bees do not leave the nest for 

 two days or so, and are easily told by their paler colour. As a 

 rule, a worker lives from eight to ten months, when hatched in 

 the autumn, but when hatched in the spring it seldom survives 

 more than three months. Worker-bees do all the work of the 

 hive, secrete wax, build the comb, feed the brood, and ventilate 

 the hive. Tlie older bees chiefly collect the honey, pollen, and 

 the so-called propolis. The hives are ventilated and the tem- 

 perature reduced by the violent vibration of the bees' wings, 

 "whilst extra heat is generated by forced respiration. 



The queen-bee comes from an egg placed in a specially pre- 

 pared cell, usually situated on the edge of the comb, and com- 

 posed of wax and pollen. A queen-bee may be formed from an 

 egg or from a worker larva when quite young, the larva being 

 surrounded by a "queen cell." The larva destined to become a 

 queen is fed on a plenteous, rich, nitrogenous diet, "queen 

 jelly,'' with which the cell is completely filled. The queen larva 

 is longer and larger than the worker, and feeds for five days, 

 then forming her open cocoon, in which after three days she 

 pupates, and at the end of sixteen or seventeen days emerges as 

 tlie " queen." A few days later the queen flies out of the hive, 

 and whUst on the wing is impregnated by the drone. She then 

 returns to the hive to commence egg-laying. As many as 3000 

 eggs are laid per day : these will turn into workers or queens ; 

 but should the queen not be pregnant, the ova turn into drones 

 only, and similarly at the end of queen life. The female A. 

 meUifica, unlike the worker, may live for three j'ears : some 

 queens have been said to retain their vitality for as long as 

 five years. 



The drone grubs feed for six or seven days, and then are 

 "capped" in their cells, the covering being very convex, a 

 feature by which we can always tell drone cells ; the wax is 

 impure, and thus the cell is darker than tlie others. In twenty- 

 five days the drone emerges. These males are killed off by the 

 workers, and even the drone brood is destroyed by them when 



