BEE-spoke-data/bees-v0 huggingface dataset:
special food. It is probable that, for three days after any larvae are hatched, the same food is fed to them as to the larva that is to develop into a queen. But by continuing to feed this rich "royal jelly" to the larva during the whole time of its growth, a queen is developed; whereas a worker bee is developed by a change from "royal jelly" to a coarser food, probably mostly pollen and honey, on the third or fourth day of the life of the larva. So it happens that workers can not produce a queen unless the colony either has eggs or has larvae not older than three days. The exact process by which the worker bees by means of feeding develop a queen or a worker bee at choice is not yet entirely clear or scientifically explained. After the queen larva has been fed for five days on its specially nourishing food, the workers seal up the cell, when the queen larva weaves about herself a cocoon and becomes a pupa. She remains in the pupal state for seven or eight days. At the end of this period she begins to want to get out of her cell; and when the worker bees are ready to have her come out they assist her by thinning the end of the 'queen-cell, and with her mandibles she completes the work of making the opening and then she comes forth a virgin queen. It ordinarily takes about sixteen days to develop a queen from the time of the laying of the egg to the adult stage. After roaming about over the combs usually for five or six days as a virgin queen, seeking during this time to find and destroy any other virgin queen or queen-cell that may be in the hive, she takes her "nuptial" flight in the open, when she meets the drone (male bee) and so becomes fertilized for the remainder of her life. She very seldom (if ever) leaves the hive again unless it be to accompany an _INHABITANTS OF THE HIVE.--Chapter VII._
issuing swarm, of which she becomes the queen and mother in a new home. Within two or three days after mating she begins laying eggs, thrusting her abdomen into an empty cell and neatly gluing an egg fast to the bottom of it. During the busy season of the year, when it is necessary that the inhabitants of the hive be kept at the highest possible number in order to furnish sufficient workers to gather the pollen and honey crop necessary to the welfare of the colony, she is capable of laying daily two or three thousand eggs--nearly twice her weight. Her laying is regulated largely by the honey flow, strength and needs of the colony, this apparently being controlled by the amount and kind of food given her by the workers. Usually in the spring (at the beginning of the honey flow in the North) when many workers are needed, she lays the most; but when the honey has been harvested she lays fewer eggs. Her ordinary laying season is from February to October (in temperate regions), but early in the spring she lays but little. She does no laying ordinarily during the dormant winter period. Perhaps the most wonderful special eharacteristie of the queen is her ability to lay either worker or drone eggs. The male elements within her are contained in a sac known as the spermatheca, in which are myriads of these male sex cells received at a single mating with the drone, and render her fertile for life. The eggs deposited in a worker-cell are fertilized from this and produce workers; those deposited in drone-cells are not fertilized and produce drones. So it is that the drone or male bee is really a bee without a father. An infertile queen can lay eggs that will produce sons and sons only. This is a reproductive power known as parthenogenesis, and possessed by only a very few other insects. The queen mother may live for a term of three or four years and perform her duty of laying well during this time, and possibly be the single mother of a half million workers and drone bees. But, ordinarily, a queen older than two years begins to fail, and for this reason many beekeepers replace all their queens as often as every two years.
Only one queen, under normal conditions, is found in the hive at one time. The workers might tolerate more than one queen; but queens themselves are jealous of each other, and, when they meet, a mortal combat follows, d ur i n g which one of them receives a fatal sting from the other and dies at once. Sometimes a queen mother and her daughter will get along together in the same hive during the summer; but ordinarily toward the fall and winter season, when the busy time is past, the mother disappears. (For discussion of management of the queen, see Chapter X.)_THE INhabitANTS OF THE HIVE.--Chapter VII._
It is well for the beginner to remember that, as the queen is, so is the whole colony..Her blood is the blood of all the members of the hive, and the faults of her strain will be the faults of her progeny. So it is all-important that the colony have a good queen mother.
**The Drone.**
The drone, or male bee, has no other business within the hive or outside of it than to fertilize the queen. He is hatehed from an infertile egg, as before explained. His development requires 3 days in the egg, 61% days as a larva and 141% days as a pupa sealed in the cocoon--24 days in all. During the first three days of the larva stage, the drone is fed rich larval food, but after that period is fed a coarser food probably composed largely of pollen and honey. He has no organs for gathering nectar or secreting wax; he has no sting, and does no work for his own support or the support of the colony, living entirely on the coil of the workers. He is shorter, thieker and heavier than the queen, and larger and elumsier than the workers. His wings extend the whole length of his body. He excels other members of the hive family only in the noise that he can make, his buzing when on the wing being very loud and apparently very satisfactory to himself.
Drones are produced in larger numbers than is seemingly necessary, as probably only one in many hundreds of them finds a queen and mates with her; but it seems necessary for the colony to have an abnormally large number of them in order that the queen may very certainly be mated within a short time after she leaves the hive on her nuptial flight. That the drone may discover a queen in flight at long distance he has, perhaps, the finest compound eyes known to science, having more than 25,000 facets in each of these two eyes, besides having three common eyes (probably for short-range vision) that may be seen on the triangle at the top of his head. If he mates with a queen he loses his life at once in the act. If he survives the main honey flow and mating season, he is not permitted to continue a useless burden on the colony, but is refused food, and is ruthlessly but economically pushed out of the hive by his sisters, to starve to death in a friendless outside world. But in case the colony for any reason has to raise a new queen, the drones are kept till this new queen is fertilized.
**The Workers.**
The worker bee (an imperfect female) does the hard work of the hive. She is developed from a fertilized egg in the smallest cells of the combs. In three days' time the egg hatches into a tiny larva and for three days this is abundantly supplied with rich larval food by the young nurse bees, after which a coarser food containing pollen and honey is fed. Under this care it grows with astonishing rapidity. In about three days from the time the egg hatehes, the larva is so large that it almost completely fills the bottom of the cell. In another three days it stretches out lengthwise in the cell, and about that time is sealed or capped over. The larva now becomes a pupa within a coocoon. In eighteen days from the time the egg hatches, or twenty-one days from the time the egg was laid, the worker bee, now perfectly developed, begins to cut through the capping, and within a short time she struggles out, rather downy and pale-looking, but fully developed, a mature bee. For some time she crawls unsteadily over the combs, jostled about and apparently unnoticed by the other bees, and then she finds a cell of honey and begins to feed. From this time on she acts as a nurse bee, taking care of the larvae, secreting the style food, and helping to keep the brood warm. The young worker bee also helps feed the queen, cleans and ventilates the live, and aids in ripening and moving about the honey and in secreting wax and comb-building when necessary. After two weeks she takes up the duties of a regular field bee, gathering nectar and ripening it by fanning the wings, gathering pollen and propolis (bee glue) and attending to all the duties and hardest work of the bee home. They are the only armed defenders of the colony and will die regardless of all self-preservation in their instinctive defense of the colony as a whole. They also rule the colony, directing the queen's life and work, and even drive out the drones at their pleasure. T he worker's most important business is to gather neetarfroom of flowers and other sources, whiichn eetarfshe changes into invert sugar, or honey, by a process whiich is started in her honey-sac or first stomaeh. A small cavity on each hind leg is used for storing and bringing in the small lumps of pollen gathered from the flowers. T he pollen n (sometimes call-ed "beehead") is an important part in the food that is fed to the larvae, but is not much used as food for mature bees and especially during the inactive winter months (see page 47). The propolis which the workers gather is selected from resinous buds, gummy substances and the like, and is used as a varnish and glue for cementing things within the hive and filling the cracks or uneven surfaces. The life of the worker bee ordinarily is a brief one: Bees that emerge in the late summer or early fall may live for six months during the winter season when they are not fatigued by work; but the worker bees emerging in the spring and early summer, that do the hard work of larva; c, old larva; d, pups.
They do not die from old age, but literally work themselves to death, often completely wearing out their wings, or are killed by accident or by enemies in the open field.
**Stages in Development of the Bees.**
The beginner will do well to learn accurately the following table giving the time consumed in the different stages of development of the queen, drone and worker bees:
egin{tabular}{l c c c} & Queen & Drone & Worker \ Stage & (days) & (days) & (days) \ Egg & 3 & 3 & 3 \ Larva & 51\% & 61\% & 51\% to 6 \ Pupa & 71\% & 141\% & 12 & to 12\% \ Total & 16 & 24 & 21 \ Queens fly to mate five to ten days after maturity; drones fly from one to two weeks after maturity; workers fly as field bees in about two weeks after maturity.
**INSIDE THE HIVE.**
CHAPTER VIII.
After the beginner has secured his bees and has learned something about the three kinds of individuals that make up the hive family, he needs to know something about the inside of the hive before he begins working with the bees.
**The Brood-Chamber Defined.**
The brood-chamber, which may be called the living-room of the bee family, is the most interesting part of the hive. It is ordinarily the lower part of the hive (a single hive-body) in which the bees are reared. This part belongs particularly to the bees themselves; and it is very rarely that the beekeeper takes away any of the honey which it contains. The honey there is for the bees' own use. The surplus honey is stored in the "supers" above the brood-chamber. In the interior of this brood-chamber are the combs in which the brood is reared and in which the bees store honey for their own use. We are now going to consider this comb, what it is made of and the uses to which the bees put it.
**Wax and Wax Secretion.**
Beeswax is a secretion that issues from the wax-glands in scales between the six segments on the under side of the abdomen after the bee has been feeding heavily. It has been estimated that bees consume from five to fifteen pounds of honey in order to produce a single pound of wax.
When secreting wax the bees, gorged with honey, h a n g in chain-like for mati o n s for hours together, suspended from the top of the hive. When the wax first issues it is a liquid which soon h a r d e n s i n t o pearly-white seals. The bees transfer this wax in theirby mixing it in the mouth or masticating it, so to speak, it becomes a pliable and ductile substance used in making the comb. There are many mineral and vegetable waxes that resemble beeswax; but for its ductility beeswax has the highest melting-point of any wax known--145 degrees Fahrenheit. So it is that if the honeycombs were to be made artificially of paraffin, for instance, they would not stand the high temperature of the hive, especially on hot days, but would sag or melt down.
### Comb and Comb-Building.
Comb-building is the one object of the bees in secreting wax. Comb is made up of compact six-sided cells of wax, built out horizontally on both sides of a common base, called the midrib. The bees show the greatest economy of space in cell-building and also provide for the greatest possible strength by interlacing the ends of the cells at the midrib. But the combs that bees naturally build in hollow trees or "gums," or sometimes on the branches of trees, are often crooked and bent. Worker comb used for brood-rearing is about % inch thick, and the bees require a space of from five-sixteenths to a half of an inch between combs as a passageway. Cells that are used for honey are usually elongated, leaving the minimum passageway between the surfaces of sealed honey in two adjacent combs; but cells which contain w o r k e r
brood are always slightly less than 1% in depth, thus leaving a wide passageway between the eappings of sealed brood in two adjacent combs. Drone comb has deeper cells than worker comb used for brood.
When the comb is first built it is nearly white in appearance. It very soon becomes "travel-
that is, the bees in walking constantly over it and over the fresh propolis (the sticky substance which they gather from trees) soon stain the white wax so that it has a brown color. After a few generations of brood are reared in the cells the comb becomes quite black. This is no indication that it is not perfectly good, for combs have been known to have been used continuously by the bees for thirty or forty years. In fact, old combs are better than new; for they become stronger with age and warmer for wintering, owing to the many layers of cocoons left on the inner sides of the cell walls by the many generations of bees which have emerged from these cells.
### Comb Foundation.
It is in the building of comb that man has come to the assistance of the bees in a most remarkable way. This is by the invention of what is known as "comb foundation," which has been in common use now for nearly fifty years, and is used by all suecessful beekeepers everywhere today. It is made by running a very thin sheet of wax between two metal rollers, thereby transforming the wax so rolled into an almost exact impression or reproduction of the bases of the cells of the natural honeycomb. When the sheet of wax is run through these rolls it becomes what its name implies --a foundation for the comb. In this foundation the bases of the cells are formed and the side walls started.
This foundation is used in both sections and frames. There are different weights of foundation. The "thin super" is best for the comb-honey sections; "medium brood" is best for the brood and extracting-frames; "light brood" is satisfactory for shallow extracting-frames. When used in the large frames, in order to prevent the combs from sagging or breaking down when filled with honey or brood, fine wires are imbedded in the comb foundation to strengthen it. With these imbedded wires there is much less danger that the combs will be broken out of the frames when the honey is extracted from them in the rapidly revolving centrifugal honey-extractor. When either the frames or sections of foundation are given to the bees, they grasp the very shallow walls and "draw them out" and build on with new wax, the work being so perfectly done that it is impossible to tell where the old wax leaves off and the new begins.
No matter how perfectly the base of the cell is formed by the rolls used in making comb foundation, the bees alter it slightly, making it a little thinner and a little rougher in appearance.
Comb foundation serves a fourfold purpose: (1) It furnishes a very considerable part of the bees wax required for building the comb at a-much smaller cost than the bees can build new comb; (2) it centers the comb in the frame or section, as the case may be, and thus the bees, when building on to it, build the comb straight, whereas bees naturally would just a little prefer to build their combs crosswise of the frames or sections and also curve them or make them crooked so as to add to their strength; (3) by the use of comb foundation made with only worker-cell bases, the natural number of drone-cells and resultant drones (often not wanted at all) can be reduced and controlled; (4) when combs are needed quickly, as during a heavy honey flow, they can be built much more rapidly because the bees can then work on the entire surface of the foundation instead of only on the lower edge of the comb as they must do if foundation is not given.
### The Cells and Their Arrangement.
In the same comb, whether it be natural comb as built by the bees or whether built from man-made comb foundation, will be found worker and drone cells, and at times queen-cells. The bees will "squeeze in" a few drone-cells, around the edges of comb built from foundation having only worker-cell bases, but such cells will be far fewer than in the bees' own naturally built combs. The bees will also very often patch up holes that may be made in the worker comb with drone-cells. The exppings of the worker-cells are slightly convex and the cells are a little more than a fifth of an inch in diameter, and a little less than half an inch deep. The drone-cells are a trifle more than a fourth of an inch in diameter and a little more than half an inch deep, the exppings protruding a little above the surface of the worker-combappings. The manufactured comb foundation ordinarily has the worker-bee size of cell bases only. Drone-comb foundation is, however, specially manufactured for use in queen-rearing. Honey is stored in both the drone and worker cells indiscriminately. The cells usually have an upward slope that helps retain the thin honey before being capped. The beginner will understand that the bees use the cells at will.for either rearing their young or storing honey. The cell walls may be thinner than one-three-thousandth of an inch; but the comb is wonderfully strong and may weigh only one-twentieth (or less) of the weight of the honey stored in it. Wax is used by the bees to cap the cells when filled with honey; but a mixture of fibrous substances and wax is used to cap the cells which contain brood, this mixture admitting air and giving ventilation for the vital use of the pupa within.
The brood is normally start-ed at the center of a comb (in h he center of the hive), the circular p a t e h of brood there gradually in - creasing as the e o l o n y builds up t i l the greater part of the comb may be filled with honey and pollen, convenient for the bees to feed to the brood, the pollen usually being stored in a narrow band of cells just above the brood, the honey being stored above the pollen and in the upper corners of the comb. Sometimes the comb adjacent to the outside frame of brood is filled with pollen and honey.
A comb of solid worker brood. The beekeeper delights in such a comb.
Queen-cells, if present at all in the hive, are usually found built about the lower edges of the coub or on possible depressions of the combs.
**Pollen.**
Pollen, the fertilizing dust of flowers, is harvested by the bees and is stored in the cells for food. It is the breadstuff of the bees, furnished by flowers. It is of a powdery nature, and may be red, green, brown or yellow, depending on the source. The bees carry the pollen into the hives, packed in pellets in the "pollen-baskets" provided by nature on their rear legs, depositing it generally in the worker-cells. This pollen furnishes the nitrogenous food for the bees themselves, but more especially for the larvae. Without it brood-rearing could not be carried on; and, if there is no natural pollen, substitutes sometimes are provided, although with doubtful results. The pollen, moistened with honey, is packed firmly into the cells by the bees--these cells, as before stated, ordinarily being located close to the cells of brood. This packed pollen, or beebread, is of a somewhat disagreeable taste (to man), but has great nutritive properties.
**Propolis.**
Another substance gathered by bees, and very necessary to them, is a substance known as propolisolis, or bee glue. It is ordinarily gathered from the resinous coats of the buds of trees and smaller plants. But lacking this source of supply the bees seemingly resort to various substances such as varnishes, resin, pitch and the like. Bees gather propolisis and carry it to their hives precisely as they do pollen. It is never packed in the cells, but applied at once as needed for coating over the inside of their hives, filling craeks and creviees, covering cocoons of wax worms or other objectionable matter that may have got into the hive, and for making things fast and close generally within their home. Propolis is an exceedingly sticky and strong glue, yet it is hard and brittle when cold. The beginner has yet to learn how disagreeable it may be, and what a nuisance it can prove to the beekeeper when manipulating the hive; yet it is important to the bees' welfare, especially in making the hive snug and warm for the winter. Propolis may be removed from the hands or apiary tools by the use of wood alcohol or turpentine.
**Honey.**
Honey, the chief product of the bees and the chief object of the beekeeper, is a sweet produced from the nectar of flowers. It is gathered by the bees and carried in the honey-sac to the comb in the hive. In the process of gathering and storing, the nectar is evaporated and chemically modified by the bee, rendering it a partly digested sweet. Honey depends for its color, odor and flavor on the flowers from which it is gathered. These vary greatly; as for instance, buckwheat, orange or clover honey have their entirely different color, flavor and aroma. Honey contains a large per cent of water, especially when first deposited in the comb and before the bees have had a chance to evaporate (ripen) it. But there is a great difference in the original density of honey, due to the difference in the nectar of various plants. For instance, white clover honey may contain as much as 75% or more of water when first gathered by the bees, and will often drip like water from the combs when handled. But the bees proceed at once to ripen it by evaporation. They accomplish this by the fanning of their wings within the hive and at the hive entrance as well as by the warmth of their bodies and, possibly, certain mouth processes. A quarter of the weight of freshly deposited honey may be evaporated within the first day after having been gathered. The bees cap the honey over when thoroughly ripened; but, whether capped over or not, honey grows thicker the longer it is left on the hive, unless the bees are compelled to leave it exposed by clustering in a smaller space on arrival of cooler weather. The amount of honey gathered by a strong colony of bees during a good honey flow and with good weather conditions may run from five or six to even twenty or more pounds a day.
Honeydew, a sweet excreted by insects on certain plants and trees, is a substance sometimes gathered by bees and stored in the combs just as honey is stored. It is ordinarily a nuisance to the bekeeper unless it is used for brood-rearing as gathered, or stored in combs to be saved for feeding the bees next spring. It is not suitable as winter food for the bees except in a warm climate where the bees can fly freely every few days during the winter, and it is not suitable for market.
**EXamining AND HANDLING BEES.**
At the very beginning of the actual work of handling the hees and manipulating the hive, the beginner should learn how to avoid being stung. This is not difficult.
**How to Avoid Being Stung.**