Page:How to Keep Bees.djvu/79

Rh results of the process of wax-making is the elimination of oxygen from the honey. There is of weight eight times as much oxygen in honey as of hydrogen and carbon combined; while in wax there is at least sixteen times as much carbon and hydrogen as of oxygen. Though wax is a fatty substance, yet it is not the animal fat of bees, as is so often asserted; it is a product especially developed for a far different purpose than is the fat of animals. The bees are much superior to us in this respect, since they manufacture from their own bodies the building materials for their homes.

The special apparatus for the secretion of wax is very interesting to the student skilled in microscopic investigation. The outward or visible portion of this apparatus consists of four pairs of little membranous plates on the under side of the abdomen; these are not visible unless the body is torn apart and dissected, because they are on the front portions of the second, third, fourth and fifth abdominal segments, and each is covered by the rear portion of the segment just in front of it. Immediately within each of these wax plates is a gland which secretes the wax in liquid form, and it passes through the membrane by a kind of osmosis, considerably more mysterious than is that most mysterious process ordinarily. As the wax passes through the membrane it hardens and is pushed backward behind the segment which covers it and protects the wax plate, and appears as a pearly scale on the abdomen of the bee. (Plate VI.)