Bee frame

“ These are good for beginners or persons who do not judge distances well and are preferred by many professional bee keepers. If unspaced frames are used, the brood frames should be 13/8 inches from center to center. A little practice will usually enable anyone to space quickly and accurately. Careful spacing is necessary to prevent the building of combs of irregular thickness and to retard the building of pieces of comb from one frame to another.
A beginner in beekeeping should by all means, if possible, visit some experienced bee keeper to get suggestions in handling bees. ”

“ We shall first describe the two larger eyes, which, as seems to be the case with all insects, are immovable, and have neither irides nor pupils, nor eyelids to cover them, but are protected from the dust or pollen of flowers by a number of small hairs, as well as by a horny tunicle, which defends and secures them from injury. The multitude of hexagonal lenses which compose the eye of a bee make it - 35 - appear, when viewed through a microscope, exactly like honey-comb. ”

“ No sight is more exciting than that of a swarm of bees. The air is clouded with the circling bees—vocal with their united music, while the eyes of the bee-master quietly watch their descent. As soon as the queen settles, the bees cluster around her and hang from the branch on which she has settled. As soon as the great mass has settled, take your bee-box or hive, hold it with one hand, mouth or bottom upward, beneath the swarm, enclosing as many of the pendent bees as the situation will allow. ”

“ Is it not odd that bees can make so much wax from their small wax-bags?
Did you ever find in the earth the nest of a humble-bee? The humble-bee queen works. Humble-bees dig holes in the earth with their front feet.
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When they have made a hall and a room, they make a nest. It is of grass, or leaves, or hay, cut fine. They lay eggs in the nest.
They make honey in large combs. The combs are more soft and dark than those which the hive bee makes. Field mice and moles eat these bees and their combs. ”

“ Thus, again, we are struck with the fact that the more closely we examine the organs of any segment of the body of the insect, the more reason do we find to admire the skill, and the care for His creatures, manifested by the infinitely wise and the infinitely good Maker of them all. Beauty, adaptation, perfection, are the words which are continually suggested to our minds by the contemplation of the structure of the bee. ”

“ Knowing that in the breeding season, the bees resort much to springs of water in the woods, the hunter places on a flat stone a small quantity of honey-comb, and draws round it a circle of white paint. The bee, on approaching the honey, is necessitated generally to cross the circular line, and, of course, its body becomes bedaubed with the colouring matter, and the direction of its route when flying is thereby easily ascertained. ”

“ Together they leave the nest, together they fly from flower to flower, together they re-enter it. Together, too, they seem to glow in industry—to emulate each other’s toil. But all the while that the true industrious bee is collecting pollen and nectar the double is only pretending to do so—or rather, let us say, seeming—and whilst the former bustles about, feeding the larvæ and making the cells, the latter only bustles about, like the shadow of a busy person on the wall. But when the true bee lays an egg, the double lays one too, almost at the same moment, and in the very same cell. ”

“ From one and the same nest there come out several inhabitants, brothers and sisters, the males with a bright brick-red fleece, and the female of a splendid velvety black, with dark-violet wings. They are all the children of the Bee who built or repaired and furnished the cells. The male Bees lead a careless existence, never work, and do not return to the clay houses except for a brief moment to woo the ladies; they have nothing to do with the housekeeping or the new nests. What they want is the nectar in the flower-cups, not mortar to build with. ”

“ In each hive there are three kinds of bees. The queen bee is the first. She rules all, and she is the mother of all.
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The queen bee does no work. She lays eggs in the cells. The father bee is called the drone. He does no work.
Who, then, builds so many fine cells? Who lays up so much honey? Who feeds the baby bees?
The small, quiet, brown work bees do all that.
In each hive there is one queen bee to lay eggs.
And there are the drone bees, who hum and walk about. And there are more than you can count, of work bees, to do all that is done.
WORK AND PLAY.
How does a bee grow? ”

“ With the mandibles of the upper jaw opening right and left, and the maxillæ or lower jaws, which serve to hold the object laboured upon, the insect prepares its work for the sweeping-up apparatus of the lower parts. Thus, when combs become mouldy, or in any way unfit receptacles for brood or honey, these tools provided by Nature serve the place of hands, and the bees are able to chop up in small pieces, and remove from their dwelling, whatever lumber of this kind may be offensive to them. ”

“ Another provision of the bee's limbs consists in a pair of hook's attached to each foot, with their points opposite to each other, by means of which the bees suspend themselves from the roof or sides of hives, and cling to each other as they do at swarming time or prior to and during the formation of new comb, thus forming a living curtain. ”

“ The hard black bodies of beetles are composed of it, and, wonderful to relate, of this substance the downy wings of the butterfly are made. You will remember that in the chapter on the eye of the bee we saw that the facets have a beautiful appearance; they too are made of chitine, as are the tendons, legs, hairs, membranes, and many other parts of the body.
The abdomen of the queen and of the worker is divided into six rings or belts, but the drone, having a somewhat [37] larger body, has seven. ”

“ As a caution to my brother bee-keepers, I will say: Don't climb unless you are sure of your footing. On the 26th of last May, I was called on to hive a swarm of bees that had settled high up in an apple tree. Having been a great climber from childhood's days, I bounded up to the top of the tree, and sawed off the limb containing the swarm while I stood on a limb below. The additional weight of the bees and limb split off the one on which I stood, and down came Smith, bees and all—a distance of 22 feet. ”

“ In each of the hinder limbs, one of which is represented in Plate II. Fig. 2, there is an admirable provision made for enabling the Bee to carry to its hive an important part of its stores, and which neither the queen nor the male possess, being exempted from that labour, viz. a small triangular cavity of a spoon-like shape, the exterior of which is smooth and glossy, while its inner surface is lined with strong close-set hairs. This cavity forms a kind of basket, destined to receive the pollen of flowers, one of the ingredients composing the food of the young. ”

“ The stout and bustling humble-bee leads with a deep bass rumble as it blunders from blossom to blossom on the bramble or stirs the dust amidst the tree roots as it searches for something, the bee alone knows what. ”

“ Some bees again—which are not as civilized as those in our hives—build only one row of rearing-cells and rest their combs on shapeless and extravagant columns of wax. Their provision-cells are nothing but great pots, grouped together without any system or order. You could no more compare these nests with the cities of our own honey-bees than you could a village made up of huts with a modern town. ”

“ In fact the bee, being in the building stage of its operations, goes on building, although in so doing it is carrying on a useless, if not an injurious, work. A similar state ensues when the Insect ceases to build and begins to bring provisions to the nest; although a substituted cell may contain a sufficient store of food, the bee goes on adding to this, though it is wasting its labours in so doing. ”

“ In a state of nature bees avail themselves of hollow trees, crevices in rocks, or other cavities of various kinds. Swarms escaped from apiaries will frequently find an entrance to the space between the roof and upper ceilings of houses, and extraordinary quantities of comb, brood, and bees have been taken from such places. ”

“ The nurse bees now seal up the cells with a preparation similar to wax, leaving them with coverings which, by their greater convexity and darker colour, distinguish them readily from honey cells. The pupa then spins round itself a film or cocoon, just as a silkworm does in its chrysalis state: workers and drones occupy thirty-six hours with this process; princesses, which spin only half-cocoons, finish them in twenty-four. The microscope shows that this cradle-curtain is perforated with very minute holes, through which the baby bee is duly supplied with air. ”

“ Plate VI. you will see the position the antennæ occupy on the worker bee’s head, whilst (a) Plate VII. will show you the feeler in detail. [13] The antennæ of the worker bee each consist of a single long joint, and eleven small joints. The long joint is called the “scape,” meaning a shaft or stem, whilst the small ones are called the flagellum, a Latin word meaning “a little whip.” In (a) Plate VII. they have been numbered 1 to 11, as you will see. The antennæ of the drone, while resembling those of the worker, have one more small joint in the flagellum, thus making the total number twelve. ”

“ This insect, instead of at first appearing in its grub stage, and then, after a time, putting on the adult form, is at first active and furnished with six legs, two long antennæ, and four eyes. Hatched in the nests of bees, it at first attaches itself to one of the males, and then crawls, when the opportunity offers, upon a female bee. ”

“ Thus it becomes very fat, and grows to a size much larger than that of the full-grown bee-grub, having early dropped its six long clinging legs, which, having performed their proper function in catching hold of a bee, are no longer needed. It changes to a perfect beetle in autumn, lies in the bee's nest all the winter, and emerges in the spring. ”

“ When she finds the place she wants she puts some honey and pollen there, and lays an egg on the little pile. After a while the larvas come out of the eggs. When they have eaten what they want they make a cocoon, and curl up for a rest while they are being made into little workers. You know, the bee family is made up of the mother bee, who is called the queen, and many fathers, who are called drones; all the rest are workers. ”

“ Speedily awakened to its responsibilities, the young bee assumes, as its earliest duties, the tending of the brood-cells, the feeding of the larvæ, and the various offices so recently performed for itself by its slightly older sisters. Then, as strength increases, the wings are tried in flight; the locality of its home is reconnoitred, and in two or three days after its emergence into its complete condition it issues forth on journeys, nearer or more remote, in search of stores for the perpetually recurring wants of the succession of children continually being reared in the hive. ”

“ How much like human creatures the bees are!
I have told you how the working bee nymphs are hatched; the complete bee is formed in twenty-one days. The process is nearly the same, in respect to the queen bees and the drones; the former, however, are hatched in sixteen days, and the latter in twenty-five, from the laying of the eggs. There is one thing in respect to the royal bees, or queens, too curious to be omitted. When they are nearly ready to emerge from their cells, the bees gnaw the covering so as to make it very thin. ”

“ The posterior legs are the chief organs used by the majority of bees for the conveyance of pollen to store in their cells, or, as in the case of humble-bees or the hive bee, the bee bread for the food for the young, or the requisite materials, in the majority of other bees, for nidification. ”

“ The glass may be taken away a little distance off, and placed in a flower-pot or other receptacle, where it will be safe when inverted and the tin taken away: the bees will then be glad to make their escape back to their hive. A little tapping at the sides of the glass will render their tarriance uncomfortable, and the glass may then be taken into a darkened room or out-house, with only a small aperture admitting light, which must be open; the bees, like all insects, make towards the light, and so escape. The bee-master should brush them off with a feather from the comb as they can be reached ”

“ The bee, whose habit it is always to alight on the edge of any plane, has to travel through the paint to reach the bee-bread. When, therefore, she flies off, the observer can track her by the white on her body. ”

“ In looking for the queen in full hives, she is usually found on the brood combs, unless in opening the hive she may have been frightened, and taken refuge in some hiding place, as the corner of the hive, at the bottom ends of the comb-frames, or some similar hiding place. After we become familiar with her appearance and movements we are able to find her quite readily, even when the hive is crowded with bees.
WORKER BEE.
The worker bee is much smaller than the queen. On the worker devolves all the labor of the swarm. They collect honey, pollen or bee bread, and propolis, or bee glue. ”

“ The bee examines the inside of the old cell to see where repairs are needed, tears down the rags of cocoon hanging on the walls, carries out the bits of earth fallen from the vault pierced by the inhabitant in order to get out, mortars any places out of repair, mends the orifice a little, and that is all. ”