. Bees for pleasure and profit; a guide to the manipulation of bees, the production of honey, and the general management of the apiary. Bees. NATURAL HISTORY OF THE HONEY BEE. ,3 These consist of long hairs, in which the bees carry the pollen which they collect from the flowers. A bee never gathers pollen from more than one kind of flower in a, single iourney, and it is owing to this wonderful provision of nature that we do not have the pollen of one species of flower wasted by being carried to another species which it could not fertilize. Honey comb, as most people know, is composed of small
. Bees for pleasure and profit; a guide to the manipulation of bees, the production of honey, and the general management of the apiary. Bees. NATURAL HISTORY OF THE HONEY BEE. ,3 These consist of long hairs, in which the bees carry the pollen which they collect from the flowers. A bee never gathers pollen from more than one kind of flower in a, single iourney, and it is owing to this wonderful provision of nature that we do not have the pollen of one species of flower wasted by being carried to another species which it could not fertilize. Honey comb, as most people know, is composed of small hexagonal or six-sided cells. In these the honey is stored and the brood reared. The queen deposits one egg in the bottom of each empty cell. She lays two kinds of eggs : one kind, which she lays in the small-sized cells, produces the worker bees; and the other kind, which she deposits in the larger cells, produces the drone bees. The queens, as we shall presently see, are also produced from worker eggs placed in acorn-shaped cells, and supplied with different food—the same eggs precisely as, under different conditions, would produce worker bees. If we examine the combs in a hive, we shall find that they are chiefly composed of the small cells, five of which measure an inch across: these worker combs are about g inch in thickness. In the drone comb—, that composed of the larger cells—only four cells go to the inch. This drone comb is found principally at the sides of the hives, and is usually built when honey is coming in in large quantities, as it requires less beeswax for its construction. It measures about 1§ inch in thickness. A swarm of bees when left to itself usually clusters in the highest part of the hive, and there builds about four or five worker combs. When these are. Fig. 3.—Newly Built Comb. Hearing completion, which will probably be in ten days or a fortnight, the bees commence to build other combs at the sides of them, and these are generally compos
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Keywords: ., bo, bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, booksubjectbees, bookyear1907
