Bee

a honey-making insect allied to the wasp and the ant. There are two or three hundred species. Some are solitary, each female bee making a cell somewhere in which to place her own eggs. Some species lay their eggs in the cells of other bees, and hang around themselves to be fed. Several species of mining bees associate to the extent of digging a tunnel or shaft in common, from which each female leads off a cross shaft for her own cell. Other species again, some of which it is difficult to tell from wasps, make mud cells or bore tunnels in twigs, or piece bits of leaves together into thimble-shaped cells, but always for the purpose of storing a drop of honey and an egg that the helpless, footless grub may have a home and food until it grows and changes into a bee. Wasps fill their cells or feed their young with insects, though oftentimes eating nectar themselves; but bees do not meddle with insects. They feed honey and pollen to their young and they eat honey. Of social bees that build combs in common, our native species are all bumblebees. The ordinary hive bee has been introduced from Europe. Wild bees hiving in the woods are European bees that have escaped from domesticity, some of them in colonial days. We have about fifty species of native bees or bumblebees. When winter comes the bumblebee queen hides away. The rest of the family perish, and in the spring the queen comes out, lays eggs, and starts a new family. One of the best paragraphs written by entomologist Comstock is the following tribute to this cheerful American:

The clumsy rover, the bumblebee, is an old friend of us all. As children we caught her off thistle-blossoms and imprisoned her in emptied milkweed pods, and bade her sing for us. We robbed her nest in the hayfield, and tried to believe that the strongly-flavored honey, mixed with dirt, was delicious. And all our lives the sound of her droning has brought to us visions of blue skies, roadsides golden with buttercups, and fields purple with clover blossoms. And she has deserved all the attention and affection bestowed upon her, because she is usually good-natured and companionable. She is a happy-go-lucky insect, and takes life as it comes without any of the severe disciplining and exact methods of her cousin, the honey bee.

Emerson has caught the same note:

Maeterlinck's Life of the Bee, although not a technical or scientific treatise, is very interesting. Lubbock's Ants, Bees, and Wasps should be read by one interested in these insects.

The honey bee most valued by bee raisers is the Italian bee. The importation of Italian queen bees in tiny cages provided with bee food is a regular part of the business. The domestic arrangements of bees have been the subject of much study and guesswork. There are three kinds of individuals in a bee colony--drones, workers, and a queen. A strong hive contains several hundred drones and 35,000 to 40,000 workers. The drones are the males. They are broader and blunter than the workers. They have no sting. They do no work. Usually at the end of the swarming season they are killed by the workers, or driven from the hive, although, if food be plenty, the massacre may not be complete. The workers are undeveloped females. They gather honey, build combs, fill cells, feed the young bees, defend the home, and keep it tidy. The queen is the honored head of the colony. She lays eggs at the rate of 4,000 a day, producing two or three new swarms each season.

The first need of a new swarm of bees, once it has found a hive or hollow tree, is beeswax to build combs. A delegation of the workers gorge themselves with honey and hang themselves up like a curtain, clinging one to another from an overhead surface. In a day's time wax begins to ooze from wax pockets in the crevices of their abdomens. The other workers gather this wax from their comrades, and proceed to build the six-sided cells of a honeycomb. The comb cleared of honey is the beeswax of commerce. The workers consume twenty-one pounds of honey in producing one pound of wax. The cells are of two sizes. In the larger cells, the queen bee lays eggs that hatch into larvae that in turn become drones. In the smaller cells eggs are deposited that in the end produce workers. The young larvae (grubs) appear in twenty-one days and they are footless and helpless. Both young drones and young workers are tended by the workers and fed on honey and beebread. Beebread is made from the pollen of flowers, and is collected on their hind legs by the workers.

A queen bee is reared by stimulating an extraordinary growth of one of the larvae from which a worker is ordinarily reared. The workers usually cut away the cell walls of three adjacent worker cells, and make one large cell. They destroy two of the eggs and feed the larva of the third an extraordinary quantity of "royal jelly," an exceedingly rich food excreted from the mouth of a worker. When this well-fed larva emerges from the cell, a full-fledged queen, rivalry ensues. Many of the workers support the new queen and the old queen leaves, secedes, "swarms" with a large body of her followers and establishes a new colony. When a second queen bee hatches history repeats itself, and a second swarm leaves the hive. If several queen bees mature at the same time, a battle royal ensues between them. The workers allow them to use their enormous stings on each other till all but one are dead. They honor the survivor and carry her dead rivals out of the hive.

Bees are inactive in winter, yet need some food. This they store up in the form of honey. The mouth parts of the workers are prolonged into a sort of tube which is inserted in flowers, in search of nectar. The nectar is stored in the honey stomach of the bee and then deposited in the honeycomb. White clover yields excellent honey, but the bee is unable to reach the nectar of red clover. Basswood honey is considered superior. Bears are fond of honey and are determined to have it, despite the stings of the infuriated bees. Not infrequently a swarm of bees, robber bees, attacks the hive of a weaker colony, and carries the honey away. Kipling's Junglebook gives a vivid account of an invasion of "red dogs" that got into difficulty among the bees.

The bee hunter or woodsman in search of wild honey carries a bit of honeycomb into the woods. When a bee settles on it to extract honey, he sprinkles flour on her so that he can mark her flight easily. After a number of these powdered insects have established a line leading in a definite direction into the woods, the hunter seats himself in a new position some distance at one side, and establishes a new line of direction. Where these lines seem to cross he expects to find bees going in and out of a tiny hole high up, it may be, in some old tree. First he frightens the bees by smoke. They think their house is going to be burned, so they fill themselves with honey, and are no longer "cross." Then he fells the tree, cuts open the cavity, and carries the honey home.

Various locations have been celebrated for honey. The promised Canaan was a "land flowing with milk and honey." Mount Hymettus in Greece, and Sicily were celebrated among the ancients. As previously stated our choicest strains of bees come from the Apennines of Italy. The honey of Switzerland is famous for clearness and purity. The Scotch carry their beehives to the mountains for a few weeks when the heather is in bloom.

A belief, deep seated in Greek, Roman, and medieval superstition, to the effect that, in addition to ordinary methods of reproduction, honey bees sprang by spontaneous generation from the carcasses of dead animals, particularly of oxen, is now thought to have had this foundation. A fly with much the appearance of a bee, only a little larger and having one pair of wings, is hatched from a rattailed maggot that infests carcasses. It has been suggested that the supposed bees were newly produced flies of this sort.

According to the twelfth census, the annual production of honey in the United States is 61,196,160 pounds; of beeswax, 1,765,315 pounds; having a total value of $6,164,904. Texas leads in bee products. California, New York, Missouri, Illinois, and Pennsylvania report over $200,000 worth each. Taking the United States as a whole, about one farm in nine keeps bees. Their total value is placed at a trifle over $10,000,000; which means that, in addition to making their own living, bees produce two-thirds of their entire value each year. The following is an estimate (1905) of the annual production of honey in a number of countries:

From a bulletin issued by Dr. Phillips of the department of agriculture in 1908 we abstract as follows: The growth of apiculture during the past half century has been remarkable, and its present extent is little understood. Bee keeping is usually not the sole occupation, but a side line. There are in the United States over 700,000 bee keepers producing annually $20,000,000 worth of honey and $2,000,000 worth of beeswax. The average number of colonies is less than six. The annual importation of honey amounts to about 2,500,000 pounds, and that of wax to about 700,000 pounds.

The honey bee probably does more good to American agriculture as a pollenizing agent than as a honey producer. The present sources of loss are due to swarming, winter losses, waste of wax, enemies, disease and wasted nectar. There is much need of further investigation in apiculture.

Prior to the discovery of ways of making sugar, honey was the chief sweet known. Demosthenes and Cicero were fond of honey, but they had never heard of sugar.

See Ant; Wasp