142 
Beekeeping 
must take place to permit her to produce the large number 
of eggs which she lays in the height of her activities. The 
larvae, as has been explained in the previous chapter, take 
enormous quantities of food, given them by the worker 
bees, permitting the rapid growth during the short period 
of larval development. 
The food of the various members of the colony all comes 
from nectar and pollen. The workers eat honey and pollen 
for their own nourishment but modify the raw materials 
before feeding the larvae. They also normally feed the 
queen and the drones, but the composition of the material 
furnished is not determined. That the raw materials may 
serve their purpose, they must be so modified that they 
may pass through the walls of the alimentary canal and 
then remain in a soluble condition in the blood until taken 
up by the tissues. To accomplish this, various digestive 
enzymes are needed. The source of these will be discussed 
later. 
The digestive processes of the bee are not thoroughly 
understood. The usual discussions, which are abundantly 
numerous in spite of our lack of knowledge, are too often 
confined to the drawing of analogies with human digestion. 
No such analogies are permissible and it is, for example, 
entirely unwarranted to apply the name “chyle stomach” 
to the ventriculus, because of a supposed homology with 
human intestinal digestion. The whole structure of the 
insect alimentary canal is different from that of man and it 
is, in fact, better not to apply names to any of the parts 
which are drawn from human anatomy. It is perhaps per¬ 
missible to use the terms mouth, oesophagus and anus for 
both insects and man, but to call the ventriculus the chyle 
stomach or the rectal ampulla the large intestine is mislead¬ 
ing. These parts do not seem to have homologous func¬ 
tions in man and bees. 
The structure of the alimentary canal has been well 
described by Snodgrass and by other workers and in so 
far as a knowledge of anatomy is helpful there is little room 
