Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/173

Rh place of the "leaky, draughty" basket-work skeps with which he was familiar, he would find cause for amazement. In his time, the bee-keeper carried for his protection in the apiary an ineffective brazier of coals; to-day, when we lift the lid from a hive, we quell the turbulent swarm within by a few puffs from a long-nosed, bellows-fitted smoker. Instead of encountering an irregular mass of unequal, crooked pieces of honeycomb built firmly to the sides and bottom of the skep, and affording no chance whatever for further examination unless cut ruthlessly from their foundations, in which case the flowing honey from the pierced cells would drown many of the swarm, we now find either eight or ten oblong wooden frames, each enclosing a straight sheet of hexagonal-celled honeycomb. Upon the surfaces of these combs the bees live, and in their cells they store the honey and raise the young bees. Thus at a moment's notice, and without in the least disturbing any function of the swarm, we can study the whole economy of the hive, whereas, hampered both by his lack of appliances and by the medieval and impracticable interior of the hive, Virgil must either have suffocated the swarm with acrid fumes in order to subdue it or have drowned it in the flowing honey of the broken combs.

Though he knew much about the life of the swarm, and understood well the different labors into which the toil of the hive is divided, his knowledge was thus of necessity gained largely by inference, without the aid of ocular proof. He might see the sentinels stationed at the entrance of the hive to intercept any robbers or bewildered strangers who might try to enter; he might also see the homecoming bees alighting at the threshold, pausing an instant to balance themselves, then darting into the hive. But he could never follow upon their track, as we can, to see them storing their loads of nectar in the half-filled cells, or placing in the compartments reserved for the purpose the tiny pellets of bright colored pollen, carried home in the little pouches upon their thighs.

Nor could he watch the deeper interests of the hive unfold themselves. The queen, attended by her little retinue of caretakers, goes about the combs performing her one duty of laying her eggs, one in the bottom of each empty cell, the male eggs in the drone cells, the female in the worker cells. One cohort of workers cares for the brood, supplying royal jelly for the nourishment of the embryo queens, if it be the swarming season; and feeding the tiny milky worker and drone grubs which have hatched from the three-day old eggs. Such of these grubs as have reached the proper age are sealed over with a porous capping under which they grow and change form until about the twenty-first day from the laying of the eggs, when the perfect, newborn bees, still gray and fuzzy, chew the waxen coverlets from their cells and traverse with slow, clinging crawl the comb about them. Other workers keep