Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume II.djvu/472

 452 BEE with the intestine, by a projecting valvular ap- paratus, with a very small opening, preventing all regurgitation of the food. The muscular strength of bees is very great, and their flight is rapid and capable of being long sustained. Notwithstanding the cultivation of the hive bee from the earliest antiquity, its history was little more than a series of conjectures until the invention of glass hives in 1712 by Maraldi, a mathematician of Nice, enabled naturalists to study the indoor proceedings of the bee; this invention was taken advantage of by Reau- mur, who laid the foundation of the more re- cent discoveries of Hunter, Schirach, and the Hubers. A hive of bees consists of three kinds, females, males, and workers; the females are called queens, not more than one of which can live in the same hive, the presence of one being necessary for its establishment and mainte- nance ; the males are called drones, and may exist by hundreds and even thousands in a hive; the workers, or neuters, as they have been called from the supposition that they be- longed to neither sex, are by far the most nu- merous. The queen lays the eggs from which A, Drone. B. Queen Bee. C, Worker. D, Leg of Worker, showing cavity for propolis. E, Cells for honey. the race is perpetuated ; the males do no work, and are of no use except to impregnate the females, after which they soon die or are kill- ed ; the workers colleat the honey, secrete the wax, build the cells, and feed and protect the young. The females and workers have a sting at the end of the abdomen, which is absent in the males ; this formidable weapon consists of an extensile sheath, enclosing two needle- shaped darts of exceeding fineness, placed side by side ; toward the end they are armed with minute teeth, like those of a saw, whence it happens that the animal is fre- quently unable to withdraw the sting from an enemy that it has pierced, causing its own as well as its victim's death ; the sting is protruded by several muscles so powerful that it will penetrate -^ of an inch into the thick skin of the human hand. When the sting enters the flesh the acrid poison is squeezed into the wound from a bag near its base ; the poison is a transparent fluid with a sweetish and afterward acrid taste, and an acid reaction ; it is of so active a character that a single sting almost instantly kills a bee ; animals have been killed and men nearly so by the stings of an en- raged colony whose hive had been upset. The queens are more peaceable and less disposed to sting than the workers. These three kinds of bees are of a different size and may be easily recognized ; the males are of the heaviest flight. The queen bee is the largest, being 8-J lines in length, the males being 7, and the workers 6 ; her abdomen is longer in proportion, and has two ovaria of considerable size ; her wings are so short as hardly to reach beyond the third ring, and her color is of a deeper yellow. She is easily recognized by the slowness of her march, by her size, and by the respect and at- tentions paid to her; she lives in the interior of the hive, and seldom departs from it unless for the purpose of being impregnated or to lead out a new swarm ; if she be removed from the live, the whole swarm will follow her. The queen governs the whole colony, and is in fact its mother, she being the only breeder out of 20,000 or 30,000 bees. The impregnation of the queen bee was long a subject of uncertain- ty; it is now kuown, and has been proved by depriving the queen bee of her wings, that this never takes place within the hive, and that if she be confined she always remains sterile, even though surrounded by males. To accom- plish it the queen leaves the hive and flies high into the air; after an absence of about half an hour she returns with unequivocal evi- dence of sexual union, having robbed the male of the organs concerned in the operation. The male, thus mutilated, soon dies a fact which has been proved by repeated observation, and from which Huber infers the necessity of a great number of males being attached to a hive ,in order that the female may be almost certa'in to meet one in her flight. "When im- pregnation occurs late in the autumn, the laying of the eggs is delayed by the cold weather until the following spring, so that the ova are ready to come forth in March ; but the young queen is capable of laying eggs 36 hours after impreg- nation. Before depositing an egg she examines whether the cell is prepared to receive it and adapted for the future condition of the grub, for queens, males, and workers have cells specially constructed for them ; the eggs producing work- ers are deposited in six-sided horizontal cells ; the cells of the drones are somewhat irregular in their form, and those of the queens are large, circular, and hang perpendicularly. When the cells are ready, the queen goes from one to the other, with scarcely any repose, laying about 200 eggs daily; the eggs first laid are those of workers, for 10 or 12 days, during which the larger cells are in process of con- struction; in these, after they have reached a very large size, she lays male eggs for 16 to 24 days, less numerous than those of the work- ers in the proportion of about 1 to 30. The royal cells, if from the productiveness of the season and the number in the hive it is de- termined to bring out another queen, are now commenced; these are of large size, an