Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume II.djvu/474

 454 BEE brood in the combs, the labors continue as fol- lows : having selected a grub, not more than three days old, the workers sacrifice three con- tiguous cells that the cell of the grub may be made into a royal cell; they supply it with the peculiar stimulating jelly reserved for the queens, and at the end of the usual 16 days the larva of a worker is metamorphosed into a queen. This fact, which rests on indisputable author- ity, is certainly a most remarkable natural pro- vision for the preservation of the lives of the colony. While a hive remains without a queen swarming can never take place, however crowd- ed it may be. The possibility of changing the worker into a queen is taken advantage of in the formation of artificial swarms, by which the amount of honey may be indefinitely in- creased. In a well-proportioned hive, contain- ing 20,000 bees, there would be 19,499 work- ers, 500 males, and 1 queen. The food of bees consists principally of two kinds, the honeyed fluids and the pollen of flowers ; they also eat honey dew, treacle, sirup, and any saccharine substance. They lick up honey and fluid sub- stances by their long proboscis from the blos- soms of various flowers ; the mignonette and clover afford honey of remarkable fragrance and in great abundance. It is inferred that bees have an imperfect sense of taste and smell from their collecting honey indiscriminately from sweet-scented and offensive flowers ; it is well known that in some places their honey acquires poisonous qualities from the flowers of different species of laurel, thorn-apple, aza- lea, and poison ash ; many mysterious cases of sickness have been traced to the consumption of such poisoned honey, and even the bees are sometimes destroyed by the vegetable poisons which they imbibe. During the spring, and until late in the autumn, bees collect the pollen from the anthers of flowers by means of the hairs on their legs, and, after forming a ball, transport it in their basket to the hive for the food of the young brood ; this pollen consists of small capsules which contain the fecunda- ting principle of flowers, and is so abundant that the bees of a single hive will often bring in a pound daily ; hence some agriculturists have supposed that the bees diminish the fecundity of plants by abstracting the pol- len, when, on the contrary, they essentially promote it, by transporting the fecundating principle from plant to plant. Honey dew is a saccharine fluid discharged from the tubes at the extremity of the body in the aphides, or plant lice ; these herd together on plants, and become so gorged with sap that they are oblig- ed to eject the honeyed fluid ; this falls on the leaves and dries, forming honey dew, eagerly sought after by bees and ants ; the same name has been given to a sweet exudation of the sap from the leaves of plants in dry weather. Bees require considerable water, but they are not particular about its purity. The food of the queen bee has been subjected to chemi- cal analysis by Dr. Wetherill of Philadelphia. That of the royal grubs is a kind of acescent jelly, thick and whitish, becoming more trans- parent and saccharine as the larva increases in size ; it has been shown by Huber to consist of a mixture of honey and pollen, modified by the workers ; the former appears amorphous under the microscope, is heavier than water, of the consistency of wax, sticky and elastic ; it con- sists of wax, albumen, and proteine compounds, and is therefore properly called bee bread ; it contains albuminous compounds, which would probably prove on analysis similar to the glu- ten of wheat. Honey alone is not sufficient for the support of bees; they require nltro- genized substances, like pollen, as well as hon- ey and non-nitrogenized food. Wax is secreted in pouches or receptacles, in the abdomen of the working bees only, lined with a membrane arranged in folds like a six-sided network ; it accumulates in these until it appears exter- nally in the form of scales between the ab- dominal rings ; these plates are withdrawn by the bee itself, or some of its fellow workers, and used for building and repairing the cells. The formation of wax is the office of the wax-workers, which may be known from the nurses by the greater size and more cylindri- cal shape of the abdomen, and larger stomach ; the secretion goes on best when the bees are at rest, and accordingly the wax-workers sus- pend themselves in the interior in an extended cluster or hanging curtain, holding on to each other by the legs ; they remain motionless in this position about 15 hours, when a single bee detaches itself and commences the construction of a cell, and the others come to its assistance and begin new cells. The quantity of wax se- creted depends not at all on the pollen consum- ed, but on the consumption of honey ; when bees are fed on cane sugar they form wax with more difficulty than when they are fed on grape sugar ; the former is not so readily de- composed, but may be changed into the latter in the bee's body by the absorption of 2 equiv- alents of water. According to Liebig, an equivalent of starch is changed into fat by los- ing 1 equivalent of carbonic acid and 7 equiva- lents of oxygen; and Dr. Wetherill suggests that wax, which bears a great analogy to fats, may be derived from honey in similar man- ner. Wax, composed of cerine and myricine, is represented chemically by Cs4Hs4O 2, and anhydrous grape sugar by CuHuOu ; so that 3 equivalents of grape sugar would yield 1 equivalent of wax by the loss of 2 equivalents of carbonic acid, 2 of water, and 28 of oxy- gen. Bees breathe by means of air tules, which open externally on the corslet ; ex- periments show that they soon perish in a vacuum or under water, and that a constant renewal of atmospheric air is necessary for their well-being. The condition of a hive,
 * filled with many thousand active and crowded

bees, and communicating with the outer air only by a small opening at the bottom, and that usually obstructed by the throng passing in and