The Family I2i 



food, the queen is able to maintain the necessary heat of 

 the body and produce an enormous number of eggs. 



We are not surprised to learn that no pollen baskets 

 have developed upon her legs, and that her hairs are but 

 sHghtly branched. 



If carefully prepared food is necessary to the usefulness 

 of the queen as an egg-producer, it is no less necessary to 

 her formation in the first place, and she has the best of the 

 good things to eat from the time she leaves the egg. 



The worker bees build sheets of honey-comb, which are 

 suspended from the top of the hive. As we buy the honey- 

 comb to-day in small boxes weighing a pound or two, we 

 see only one kind of comb, that in which honey is stored. 

 These honey cells are the same as those in which the drone 

 eggs are laid, and the young drones reared. The honey- 

 comb becomes a cradle for bees or a store-house for honey 

 at the will of the bee. But in every hive at the beginning 

 of the season there are built combs of cells like the honey 

 cells, but one-fifth smaller. 



There are often a great many of these, and they are the 

 cradles of the young worker bees. 



Later the bees build a number of large thimble-shaped 

 cells, generally on the edges of the comb, and with their 

 mouths opening downward. These are queen cells, con- 

 cerning which Pliny says, — 



" In the lower part of the hive they construct for their 

 future sovereign a palatial abode, spacious and grand, sepa- 

 rated from the rest, and surmounted by a sort of dome." 



At the beginning of the season the queen lays fertilized 

 eggs in the worker cells. She walks over the combs, puts 

 her head into each open cell as she comes to it, as though 

 to discover whether it was occupied already or was in fit 

 condition to become the cradle of a bee. Satisfied with 

 the state of the cell, she deposits in it a tiny oblong shining 



