 CHAPTER 16 CRATAL CELLS Some of Miss Apis' wax cells serve the purpose of preserve jars, as we have seen. Indeed, they all do, when we come to think of it. They do not all preserve honey and beabrit, however, who have not forgotten that the queen bee sometimes enlazes many as three thousand eggs a day, while each little egg must have a cell of comb all to itself. You can imagine that the wax-makers and cell-builders do not have a chance to grow lazy in this busy season of egg-laying. For if the queen does not lay three thousand eggs every day, she may, upon some days, and she always lays at least enough to satisfy any reasonable lover of hard work. The cradle cells of the drones are the same as the honey cells, but the worker cells are about one-fifth smaller. You see, the workers are smaller than the drones, and so could lie in smaller cradles. The cradle cell of the queen is not shaped like the other cells, but somewhat like thimble. It opens at the bottom and is a great deal larger. The queen goes about and lays an egg in each cell. She first puts in her head and examines the cell with her antennae, as if to make sure it is all right. This done, she deposits an egg in the bottom of the cell. She lays two kinds of eggs, one kind being what we call fertilized and the other kind unfertilized. The fertilized eggs always hatch into workers or queens. The unfertilized always hatch into drones. The queen is able to fertilize the eggs or not as she pleases. As soon as an egg is laid, the queen pays no further attention to it. It is now the turn of the nurse bees. The nurse bees are the younger ones that have not yet gone out of the hive. For about three days after the egg is laid, you could see no change in it. Perhaps you think it needs no attention, but a hen would not think so. She knows that eggs have to be kept warm in order to hatch, and she sits on her own eggs, with her feathers tucked down warm all about them. Miss Appis too understands that eggs need to be kept warm. She has no feathers, but she has a warm little fuzzy body, how when the eggs are laid, she and her sisters clust over the comb to keep them warm. The ancients held a good many wrong ideas and a good many right ones about bees, and our Latin friend Planny was not altogether wrong when he said the bees sat upon the eggs like hens. And about three days the eggs hatch, but not into pretty downy bees with gauzy wings. No indeed. If you were able to see what hatches out of a bee's egg, you would not imagine that queer thing could ever make a bee. It is a little white atom, with no legs and no wings, and looks like a maggot. Here is a picture of one very much enlarged. It may not look like a bee, but it still is a baby bee. If you do not like to call it a bee, you may call it a lava, for lava is the name we give to the first form of an insect after it leaves the egg. This little lava is born hungry, and the kind of nurse bees knowing that feed it with plenty of, what shall I call it, bee milk perhaps? This bee milk is manufactured by the nurses in glands in their heads. It is very nutritious, and it is the same as the royal jelly with which the queen is fed. They place the food in the cell with the lava, and watch to see that it always has enough. They feed it with honey and pollen as it grows older, and how it does it? In a few days it has grown so large that it almost fills its cradle self. It would not do to let this ravenous infant grow entirely out of bounds, but I doubt if you could guess what the nurse bees do to prevent it. They simply stop feeding it. That is certainly a sure way to check its growth. Only most babies, if treated so, would make up their minds that life with that dinner was not worth living, and would die right off. But bee babies do not die. They wait to see what will happen next. It would take a long time for any one bit of bee to guess what happens next. It is rather a peculiar performance, but Miss Appa's performances are usually peculiar. She camps over the cell of the baby bee. It would be difficult to imagine an easy way of disposing of a baby, bottle it up like a jar of pickles or a cell of honey. It is not much trouble to take care of such babies. They only need to be kept warm. In the meantime, the infant thus disposed of spins for itself a soft little silken nightcap. You see, it has nothing else to do. It cannot get anything to eat, and they do not give it so much as a rubber ring to bite on, as far as I know. So it amuses itself spinning a nightcap, or a soft little cocoon, about the upper part of its fat little bottled up body. Some babies might cry under the circumstances, but I doubt if this baby could do even that if it wanted to, or how could it cry for this mouth full of silk. The silk for its cocoon comes out of its mouth, strange to say, or rather out of a little hole in its lip. And I have no doubt it is great fun for it to draw out the fine thread and spin. Then it changes its shape. You see, it is really an infant, Miss Appis, so we cannot be surprised that it should perform in queer ways even at that tender age. It changes from a lava to a pupa. If you do not know what a pupa is, it is time you did. It is the same as a chrysalis. If you do not know what a chrysalis is, look at the picture and you will see one in the cell. You see, it is not a lava, nor yet a perfect insect, but something half way between the two. When baby Appis becomes a pupa, she does nothing more wonderful than butterflies and many other insects do, for they too become pupae on the way to being grown up, just as we become boys and girls on the way to being men and women. You may like to know that lava is a Latin word and means ghost or mask, for the lava is, in one sense, the ghost or mask of the perfect insect. But what do you think pupa means? It too is a Latin word and means doll. The pupa of insects is generally an active and does not seem to be alive, though of course it is alive, and so it is called a doll or the image of the insect. Baby Appis remains a pupa for several days, then she makes up her mind that if they want to keep their babies in bottles, they may, but as for her, she has had enough of it, so she puts up her mouth and gnaws a hole in the shape of a crescent in the cap they put over her, and probably peeps out to see the world, rather a dark world in the hive, one would think. Then she puts out her head. Then out she comes, a lovely young bee, light-coloured and downy and with beautiful, gauzy wings. The cap that is put over the young bee is very porous, so the air can get in. Baby Appis may be bottled up with safety, but she must not be deprived of air, for if she is, she will die. The queen bee is hatched from an egg exactly like that of the worker bees, but this egg, as you know, lies in a large cell, and when it hatches, the nurse bees fairly stuff the queen lava with food. The worker infants get very little beemil. They have to eat honey and bee-bread, but the queen infant is fed almost entirely upon this precious food, this royal jelly. It is because she eats so much of this that she develops into a queen. Sometimes the queen in the hive dies or gets lost. Then what do you suppose the workers do? Why, go to work to make a new queen, of course. It is a terrible thing for a hive to be without a queen, and the bees are very unhappy when it happens. But if they have eggs or very young larvae, they need to not despair. They enlarge a worker cell in which lies an egg or a very young lava by tearing down the cells next to it. Then they feed the infant, thus prompted to royalty upon queen's food, and lo, the little creature becomes a queen. Drones get much more royal jelly than workers, but no amount of feeding or starving will make them anything but drones. It takes all the eggs three days to hatch, but the queen lover attains his growth in five and a half days, while it takes the worker six and the drone six and a half. The queen spins a cocoon, changes into a pupa, and comes forth a perfect bee in all seven and a half days, while it takes the worker twelve days and the drone fourteen and a half to complete these changes. If you do a little sum in addition, you will find that it takes sixteen days for an egg to become a queen bee, twenty one days for it to become a worker, and twenty-four days for a drone egg to become a drone. As soon as the worker bees hatch out, they go to work. You already know what they do. They take care of the queen, following her about and feeding her with royal jelly whenever she is hungry, which is very often. They seem to be very fond of their hive mother, and you will always see a little cluster of bees about her, caressing her with their antennae and paying her the greatest respect. The workers also take care of the eggs and the young bees, but do not generally lay any eggs themselves. Only the queen does that. They make wax, build comb, and keep the hive clean, carrying out dead bees or anything that does not belong in it. No doubt they watch at the door, too, for bees keep sentinels always on guard to see that thieves and robbers do not come in and steal their honey. If you knock on a hive, the sentinels will fly out to see what is the matter. In a few days the young bees leave the homework to the newly hatched and go forth to gather honey and pollen and bee glue. You ought to know that bee glue is called propolis, a word that means before the city, and is soon named because the bees use it to build fortifications in times of war. Certain moths attack bee hives by crawling in and laying the eggs in the corners. When the eggs hatch, the little caterpillar like larvae that come out of them eat the comb and spoil the honey. To keep them out, the bees sometimes build walls of propolis just inside the hive door, making the entrance so narrow that only one bee can pass at a time. In this way the sentinels are better able to keep out the intruders. Bees have been known to use propolis in strange ways. You know they chink up the holes with it and glue the frames fast. Once, so the story goes, they glue to snail to the bottom of the hive. His snail-ship had crawled into the hive and the bees fastened his shell tightly to the floor. So forgoing where he was not wanted, he found his house converted into a sepulchre. Another story is the mouse that went into the bee hive. The bees stung him to death. But he was so large they could not remove him. So what did they do but cover him all over in propolis? Safe under the resinous bee glue his body could do no harm. Bees breathe as well as other creatures. They take in pure air and breathe out impure. They do not do this by means of lungs as we do, but through little holes in their sides. They cannot live without fresh air. You can well imagine that a house as crowded as theirs needs careful ventilation. They cannot lower the windows because they have none. And they would not dare open any if they had them, for all sorts of creatures would come flying and creeping and running and stealing in to get their precious honey. The only openings in the hives, as we know, are the little holes at the bottom where the bees go in and out. How then do they get fresh air? You will not be surprised to learn Miss Apis has solved this problem in a very ingenious manner. The only possible way of ventilating a hive through the little holes at the bottom is by fanning or pumping the air in and out. The bees fan a current of air through the hive by standing near the entrance holes and buzzing with their wings. The buzzing sound is made by the rapid motion of the wings, and even one bee can cause quite a little breeze. And a number of them stand together just inside, and sometimes also just outside the hive and fan. They produce currents of air strong enough to keep the crowded hive perfectly ventilated. Bees are more careful to have plenty of fresh air than our people. Goober discovered that air in a hive is nearly as pure as the air out of doors. And we should have reason to feel proud if our public buildings were as well ventilated as their bee hives. End of Chapter 16. Chapter 17 of The Bee People. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by John Brandon. The Bee People by Margaret Warner Morley. Chapter 17 The Family Exodus. One cannot go on adding several thousand members a week to one's family without sooner or later being obliged to enlarge the house or move out. The abyss people move out. As soon as a young queen comes out of her cell, the old queen packs up, so to speak, and prepares to depart. She does not carry as much luggage as the queen of England carries when she goes from Buckingham Palace to the Isle of Wight. She merely gathers up her thousands of eyes, her shortish, but still valuable tongue, her basketless legs, and other personal possessions and starts off taking with her most of the old bees in the hive and leaving behind the young queen with the young bees and the honeycomb. And the broodcomb full of eggs and larvae and pupae. She is very generous to the young queen, who, of course, is her own daughter and leaves all the furniture and silver spoons and everything of that sort behind. Away she goes with her faithful followers surrounding her in a dense swarm. The whole swarm goes careening through the air like a small cyclone, and I for one should not like to stand at its path. Some say the bees send out scouts to find a good place before the swarm starts, either a hollow tree or some other convenient shelter, or else they go into a nice new hive if somebody has been watching and has one ready. Into the new home they go, and to work they go, and in a little while you would never suspect the family had recently moved in. So busy and so thoroughly at home do they all appear. They build new combs, make new honey and bee bread, and just as soon as the cells are ready the queen continues her egg laying. Chapter 18 of The Bee People This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Gail Wamba. The Bee People by Margaret Warner Moorley. The New Queen. Queen time all is not fair weather in the old hive. The new queen, although just out of herself, understands her business perfectly, and is quite capable of going about it, but there are complications. Hers was not the only queen cell in that hive. There were others. And now, just as she has ascended the throne with the old queen peaceably out of the way, the succession being accomplished without opposition, low and behold she hears a sound, a sound that probably sends the blood to her heart and causes her very toes to tingle. The sound she hears is not that of canon afar, nor of drum beats in the distance, but it might as well be, for it is the piping of another young queen just about to come forth from its cell. The throne is not secure after all, for there is another queen to dispute it. Of course, there are ways of disposing of rivals to the throne, or there used to be, as anyone who has read the early history of England knows, you may smother them in a tower, or poison them, or do something of that sort. Bees know how to smother bees that they hate, and they know how to poison them. But queen bees prefer to fight like queens for their thrones and not get them by stealth or by striking in the dark, that is, if the rival is already out of her cradle. If a second queen hatches out of her cell before the first young queen finds her, there is a fight. The workers stand around and watch the conflict, but they never interfere, nor have I ever heard that they take sides and cheer their own candidate. The combatants seize each other with their jaws and clasp each other with their feet, trying in every way to thrust the fatal, poisoned dagger into a vital part, that is, into the soft parts between the rings of the abdomen, or where the neck joins the thorax, or the thorax the abdomen, all these places being soft and allowing a dagger that is thrust into them to reach the inner vital parts. At length, the fatal thrust is given. One of the queens is victor. The other lies dead upon the field of battle. The workers carry out the dead body, but whether they mourn, I cannot say. Certainly they do not have a grand funeral. I suppose it would not be exactly polite to the victorious queen to show too much sorrow for the vanquished one. Evidently, our queen considers one such display of courage quite enough to establish her royal character, for she does not waste time fighting any more queens, but goes to the remaining queen cells, pulls off the caps, where the bottled up queen babies lie, and sticks her dagger right into their poor, soft, helpless little bodies. After she has stung all the baby queens, she puts up her dagger, very likely determined never to put anything so valuable to such a use again. For you remember, her sting is also her ovipositor. She does not lose it when she stings a bee, because the parts where the sting enters are so soft that she can pull it out again. But you can imagine what a sad wound the barbs make when pulled out. Workers never sting a queen. If a strange queen is put into the hive, or flies in by mistake, and they do not want her, they gather about her so closely as to smother her to death, but they will not sting her. Only queens sting queens. If there should happen to be a good many bees still in the hive after a swarm leaves, the workers will not allow the queens to fight, but surround them and keep them apart until the older queen can be sent off with another swarm. If the hive is very much crowded, the bees may swarm out of it several times in one season. When all is serene within the hive, if the day is fair, the young queen takes an airing. She does not have an escort, but goes alone to view the beautiful world outside the hive. Huber was the first to discover that she flies up into the blue sky where she meets a drone who is her mate. He fills her pocket, which she carries on purpose with pollen, not flower pollen, but bee pollen. This pollen lasts as long as she lives, and she uses it to fertilize the queen and worker eggs. So you see, the drone is not so useless as he seems. Indeed, if it were not for him, there could be no workers and no queens. When she has taken her airing, queen Apis goes home and she never leaves the hive alone again. In fact, she never leaves it at all, except at the end when she goes off with a swarm. As the season wears on, the workers take counsel together. Winter is coming, and what will become of them all if the supplies give out? There must be no more mouths to feed than necessary. The queen, of course, must be taken care of, and so must the workers. But there are the drones, perhaps hundreds, or even thousands of them. They are no longer of any use. They bring in no honey, they do no work, they only endanger the lives of the whole family by eating up the winter food. So these little brown workers, on the plea of necessity, send the drones to the happy hunting grounds. Whether they are sorry about it or not, I do not know. But in any event, they fall upon their poor brothers and sting them to death, or else drive them from the hive, where they soon die from cold exposure and hunger. In late summer, you will sometimes see a disconsolate drone sitting on a flower, very likely grieving at the bitterness of his lot. Miss Apis, it seems to us very cruel of you to treat your brothers so, but we must remember that bees are not people, and that what would be very wicked in us may be perfectly right in them. The worker bees labor very hard through the summer, so that sometimes they wear themselves out in a few weeks and die. Those hatched later in the season live through the winter and are all ready to begin work as soon as the flowers come in the spring. Bees spend the winter clustered together in the hive, and are then so inactive that they seem to be scarcely alive. When bees go out from the hive for the first time to gather nectar, they are very smooth and fine-looking. But they, too, grow old. Their pretty velvety down wears off, and their wings become broken and ragged. I do not think they turn gray or get wrinkles in their faces, but they certainly do get to wear very shabby-looking wings. End of The New Queen, recording by Gail Wamba. Chapter 19 of The Bee People. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Bee People by Margaret Warner Morley. Chapter 19. Some odd notions about bees. People used to think the queen bee was a king and ruled over all the bees in the hive. They thought a hive of bees was a little kingdom with an army and officers and all sorts of workers. When you get old enough to read Shakespeare's Henry V, you'll find in it a pretty story about the bees. He says, they have a king and officers of sorts and tells how some of the bees act as magistrates at home, while others go abroad to trade like merchants and still others are armed soldiers. Some, he tells us, are masons into the buildings. Others make the bread and honey. Yet others are porters and carry heavy burdens while the judge hands the drones over to be executed. We know the truth about bees now, and yet we like to read these old stories. It used to be thought that bees carried little stones in their feet on windy days so as not to be blown away. Probably the people saw their pollen balls and mistook them for balsam. They used to think, too, that when the bees were belated and had to stay out all night, they would lie on their backs to keep their wings dry. But good many people, even yet, will not sell bees because they think it is unlucky. And when bees swarm, they sometimes use charms to keep them from going away. An old German beekeeper who lived in the United States had such a charm. He told it to a little girl, but said it would bring bad luck if she were to repeat it to another girl. She might tell it to a man or a boy, and he to another girl, and so on. But a girl must never tell it to a girl, nor a boy to a boy. I will give you the charm in German for those of you who understand German. When you see the bees swarming, you must say to them, Lieber Bienen und Lieber Bienenmutter, der Tag auf Grasen und Grünes Gras in Amen des Graters, des Sonnes und des Heiligen Geisters. Amen. You see, it is really a little prayer to the bees, and this is the English translation. Dear bees and dear mother of the bees, place yourselves upon the meadow and the green grass in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. Amen. A good many still think the bees must be told when there is a death in the family or else they will go away. Remember, the family goes at night and knocks on the hives and says so and so is dead. And sometimes adds a little prayer to the bees not to leave. Sometimes a piece of black ribbon or crate is tied on the hives. What here has written a beautiful poem called Telling the Bees, which I hope you will read. The ancients used to believe that the bee was given its marvelous habits by Jupiter, the king of the gods, because the bees fed him with honey when he was a baby and lay concealed in a cave while his angry father searched for him. Seems that the gods had their troubles as well as human beings in those days. When Jupiter's father, Saturn, who was king, was very much afraid of his own children. An oracle had told him that they would displace him. So he settled the matter as he thought by swallowing them as soon as they were born. This unfortunate habit greatly distressed Saturn's wife, Rhea. And when Jupiter was born, she gave him to the care of the curates, a Cretan tribe who were very true to their charge. They used to dance about the young god and drown his cries by rattling bronze weapons so that Saturn might not hear and so find the royal infant. Jupiter was fed upon milk and honey by the goat, Almafea, and the bees. This is the end of the story so far as bees are concerned. But perhaps you will be glad to know that when Jupiter grew up, he married Nettis, whom we would call Prudence. And she administered a drought to father Saturn, which caused him to disgorge all his children. Then Jupiter and his disgorged brothers, Neptune and Pluto, may true the words of the oracle by dethroning their very unfatherly father and dividing his kingdom among them. Jupiter took the heavens for his portion, as you know. While Neptune took the sea and Pluto the underground world for the realms of the dead. A great many people think that when bees are about to swarm, a loud noise will prevent them from leaving and they clash on tin pans or ring bells or blow whistles or do anything they can think of to make a hullabaloo. No doubt they sometimes equal the roar made by the curates about the infant Jupiter. Honey was very highly valued in ancient Greece and Italy. And that which came from Mount Hymatis was specially prized. Hymatis is a mountain in Greece, near Athens, and used to contain famous bee pastures. A bee pasture, you know, the place grown over with flowers. And Mount Hymatis was said to be rosy purple. It was so covered with heather blossoms. Hibla, an ancient city on the sea coast in Sicily, was also very celebrated for its honey. Probably the best bee pastures in the world today are in California. A great deal of fine honey is made there. Honey is not valued as highly as it used to be because we now have sugar. But you can imagine that before the sugarcane was cultivated and when people had no sweet but honey, it was a most important, invaluable article of food. Honey is very good for children and for old people. It is more digestible than sugar. And most children like it better. You remember how the queen was in the parlor eating bread and honey? And I think it was a very good occupation for a queen or for anybody else. A great deal of poetry has been written about bees. And there's one little verse that everybody knows is written by Dr. Watts. How doth the little busy bee improve each shining hour and gather honey all the day from every opening flower. The most interesting thing we have learned in modern times about bees is their relation to the flowers. Some plants cannot set seeds at all without the help of the bees. And they are very great helpers in gardens and orchards. If you want your trees loaded with apples and pears, be sure to put a beehive near the orchard. Near Boston, where a great many cucumbers are raised for market in the winter in glass houses, hives of bees are kept in the houses to fertilize the cucumbers. If the little bees did not go from flower to flower, carrying the pollen from one to another, a large force of man would have to be employed to brush the pistol of each cucumber blossom with pollen. End of chapter 19. Chapter 20 of the Bee People. This is a LibriVox recording. While LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Bee People by Margaret Warner Morley. Chapter 20, Bombus the Bumblebee. Apes Malifika is not the only honeybee in this country. Indeed, she is not even a native of America, but was brought over from Europe more than 200 years ago. The bumblebees, like the Indians, belong to America. They were here when Columbus discovered the New World. There are great many bumblebees in different parts of the world and more than 60 species in North America. The habits of them all are very much alike, however. So if we make the acquaintance of one, we shall know something of all. The bumblebees do not live in hives and they do not store up honey in beautiful wax and combs. Generally, they have a nest in the ground, though sometimes they choose a wood pile or other convenient place. Bumblebee nests are often found in hanging time. When the grass is being cut, the horses step on the nests. When outfly the angry bees and sting the horses and the men and boys. Sometimes there are so many bees nests in a meadow that it is difficult to get hay. Madam Bombus makes her nest in a hollow in the ground under a tuft of grass and it is so near the surface that one could easily dig it out with the fingers if it were not for Madam Bombus herself. Put your fingers into her nest and see what she will do. She will sting you on the nose for one thing. She seems fond of stinging people on the nose. Queen Bombus does not have a whole hive full of workers to help her when she starts her nest. On the contrary, the workers and drones die in the fall and the queen is left all alone. She crawls into some snug corner and sleeps through the winter. When spring comes, she wakes up, stretches herself, smells the early flowers, feels the warm sun, and away she flies. She first goes in search of a home. You can see her in the springtime flying about hunting carefully for a good place to make her nest. When she has found a home that suits her, she goes to the flowers and gathers pollen. From morning until night, she works as hard as she can tugging large balls of pollen to her hole in the ground. What do you think she does with it? She has no wax and cells to store it away in so she just piles it together in her nest. In this mass of pollen, she lays her eggs. She always lays fertilized eggs early in the season but I suppose she does not feed the young bees very generously on bee milk so they hatch into workers instead of queens. Of course, this is just what she wants. Soon as the workers begin to come out, she can stay at home and let them gather the pollen. The bombast is covered all over with hair, as you know, and has bands of yellow and black hairs across her body. The bombast that I know best has a yellow jacket and a broad yellow band across the top of her abdomen. The tail end of her abdomen is black. She is a very pretty furry bee and like all the bombasties, her wings are dark brown in color. The honey bee's wings are as clear as glass and that is one way you can tell a honey bee from a bumble bee. Well, Madam Bombast lays her eggs in the mass of pollen and they hatch into little larvae like those of the honey bees, only not so small. You see, Madam Bombast has to do all the work herself so I suppose it saves trouble to have the infants cradled in good pollen so they can help themselves without troubling their mother. She feeds them on bee milk at first but later I suspect they have to eat their cradles. They grow fast. No doubt they eat a great deal of pollen. When it comes time for them to change into pupae, what do you suppose happens? I do not believe you could guess if you try to mump. You see, they have no wax cells in which they can be bottled up. Queen Bombast does not cap them over as the honey bees do and leave them to their fate. She cannot bottle up her babies because she has no bottles. I shall have to tell you the secret. They bottle themselves up. You remember how the apis baby in its pretty wax and cell spawn a silk nightcap when it was capped over? Baby Bombast spins the whole nightgown. She eats a hole in the pollen about her, large enough to lie in comfortably. Then she begins to spin and does not stop until she has made for herself a yellow cocoon. It looks a little like the cocoon of a silkworm only it is much darker in color and the lower part is embedded in pollen. The upper part is sometimes quite clean and pretty. I looked into the nest of the Bombast with a yellow jacket and a yellow band across the upper end of her abdomen. And this is what I saw. Just a pile of cocoons, you see. And each cocoon is a baby bee. The larva lies curled up in its cocoon with its head bent over as you can see in this next picture. But in a few days it changes into a pupa. The young pupa is very pretty and it deserves its name. You know, pupa means doll. And if the pupa when first formed does not look like a bee doll, I do not know what it does look like. I would try to draw you some pictures of these pupae but no pictures can do them justice. They are as white as snow and sometimes have pink eyes though sometimes their eyes are blue. They look as if they had been very beautifully carved from white ivory. You can see little buds of wings held close to their sides and their long white tongues down in front. And their pretty snow white legs cuddled up close to their bodies so as not to take up too much room. Honeybee pupae are as pretty as these but they are smaller and not so easily seen. Soon these pretty white dolls become darker in color and soft hairs begin to appear. Then their wings enlarge. The down has covered their bodies, their legs are strong and black. They are no longer dolls but are perfect bees and are ready to come out. All they have to do is to bite a hole in the end of their cocoons and step out. They are damp at first and their hairs cling to their body but soon they are dry and fuzzy and as handsome as young bees ought to be. When the bees first come out their jackets in the upper part of their abdomens are white instead of yellow. I suppose they are toe-headed in infancy like some other young people you and I know but their white baby hairs soon turn to a bright canary yellow and in two or three days they would probably sting you if you called them babies. The worker bees are only half as large as the queens though they vary a good deal in size. Sometimes the eggs laid in corners or under the large cocoons hatch into poor little larvae that had no chance to grow. So they make tiny little cocoons and hatch out into funny little bits of bumblebees. Sometimes these little dwarves are no larger than honeybees but I can tell you they feel as big as anybody. They buzz about and gather pollen and honey like the other bees. Late in the summer, Queen Bombas lays fertilized eggs that make queens. I suppose the larvae are fed on all the bee milk they want and so become queens instead of workers. Queen Bombas also toward the end of the summer lays unfertilized eggs and of course these hatch into drones. Bumblebee queens do not kill each other and the bumblebees do not kill their drones. After the queens and drones are hatched, they mate high in the air and the queen stores away the pollen of the drone until next spring. When the cold weather comes, the drones and workers die and the queen hides away. Some bumblebees store up honey in the empty cocoons after the young bees have left them but you can imagine it is not very good honey. Some bumblebees make wax and use it to finish out the cocoons into better cells or even to make a few coarse cells or to mat together the grass over the nest to keep the rain out. But my bumblebees had no wax at all in their nest and at the time I saw it, they had not stored away any honey. The Bombas family is very small compared to the apis family. For some times, there will only be a dozen bees in a nest. So again, there will be several dozen. Bumblebees are very good play fellows. You want to have a good time watching the bees, catch one or two large bumblebees in a net and let them loose on the window. They will not sting you unless you touch them. Even if they get on you, if you keep perfectly still, they will leave without hurting you. You can give your pet Bombas a drop of honey or a little sugar and water and see its long brown tongue lick it up. If you want to see it perform its toilet, you can breathe upon it gently. This makes it very angry and it will buzz with its wings for a moment then go to work and clean itself all over. Bumblebees have a funny way of sticking out their legs at you as if they mean to strike you. When you come near one, outfly its legs in quite a threatening manner. Honeybees do this too, but not so much as bumblebees. The very best place to watch bees is in the fields. If you sit down near a nice patch of red clover, you will be very sure to meet a Bombas before long. She will not disturb you and you can get as close to her as you please so long as you do not touch her. You can watch her put her tongue into the little clover tubes. She's very fond of red clover and she can get its honey, but the honeybee cannot because the clover tube is too long for Miss Apis' tongue. The red clover depends on the bumblebee for fertilization and an interesting story is told of how clover was introduced into Australia. There was no red clover in Australia until the white settlers took the seed there and sowed it. Then the clover grew but bore no seed so of course it did not amount to much. People said, what is the matter with a clover? Why will it not go to seed? I wonder if you could have told them. Finally, somebody told of the relation between the bumblebees and the clover and said the clover needed the bees for there were no bumblebees in Australia so some nests of bumblebees were taken to Australia and the clover then bore seeds. I once had a bumblebee that did not know how to get nectar from red clover. It was hatched in my room and fed on sugar and water for several days. Then it was given some clover but it seemed too old to learn. It wanted the nectar for evidently it smelled it and it tried to get it but it could not find the openings in the flower tubes. It was very funny to see poor Miss Bombus run her tongue along the outside of the little flowers that make up the clover head. She found the opening to one or two of them finally but she never became an expert at gathering clover nectar. You see, she began to practice too late in life. You will sometimes see bumblebees asleep on the flowers toward night. Perhaps they have wandered too far from home. Perhaps they think flower petals make a very dainty bedroom. Often the bees kept in a room will take a nap on a cloudy day. You can tell when a bee is asleep because it looks as if it were asleep. It does not shut its eyes of course but it looks very droopy and sleepy. Look at that bee on the iris bud. Wouldn't you know it had gone to sleep? You can get a good deal of pleasure from the bees by watching them out of doors. You can see them go into different kinds of flowers and find out just how they take the nectar. Bees never sting unless you go too near their highs or else touch them. You can watch the bees out of doors and in your room as much as you please without the slightest danger. You can keep bees in the house and feed them on different kinds of flowers. They have to learn how to get the nectar from a new kind of flower. They will try and try until they have found the right opening. When once they have learned their way into a flower they can usually go at once to the nectar in another flower of the same kind. You see they experiment until they find out what to do and then they remember. End of chapter 20. End of the Bee People by Margaret Warner Moorley.