The bee people

Contents

Page

INTRODUCTION 9

Chapter

Introduction

Introduction.

BEES and flowers belong together. We cannot understand the one without the other. For, you see, bees get their food from the flowers, and the flowers need the bees to enable them to form their seeds.

The flowers that we like best have brightcolored petals. The petals of a rose are pink or white or yellow. The petals of a violet are purple, and those of a forget-me-not are blue.

Sometimes the petals are separate, as in a rose or a buttercup, and you can pull them off one by one.

Sometimes they are all grown into one piece, like the funnel-shaped flower of the morning-glory.

The bees can see the bright colors of the flowers a long way off. They can also

IO

The Bee People.

smell them, for bright flowers are generally fragrant.

Flowers make a sweet juice on purpose to feed bees and other insects. We call this

The Wild Rose, with five separate petals.

The Morning-Glory, with the petals grown together into a funnel.

sweet juice nectar, and the bees take it home and make honey of it.

The flowers like to have the bees come and take the nectar. Why, do you suppose ? If you have studied flowers, you will know ; if you have not, I must try to tell you.

You know there is a yellow dust in some flowers. It gets on your face when you smell of them. Sometimes flower dust is

Introduction.

ii brown and sometimes it is white. If you shake a golden-rod in the fall, a cloud of yellow golden-rod dust will fly out.fl^This dust is called pollen.

Nearly all flowers have^ it. It grows in little boxes called anthers; and when the anthers are ripe,\ they burst open and lef pollen.

You know how the anthers in a lily look/ They swing on the ends of the six long slender stems that stick out of the lily flower.

Nearly all flowers have anthers, but some do not have stems to the anthers. Sometimes the anthers grow right against the inside of the flower, but wherever they may be they always contain pollen. ^^^Jn the centre of the flower is another part th^U looks a little like an anther ; its stem is long\and it is marked stigma in the picture. This sf\igma is not filled with pollen. It is just a sr^icky knob.

When it gets ripe it gets sticky. If any pollen touches it, the pollen sticks fast. If you take away the petals and the anthers and their stems from the lily, this is what you will have left.

You see it is the stigma and its long stem, and there is another knob at the other end of the stem opposite the stigma. This other knob is hollow. It is a seed-cup and is filled with seeds. The seeds cannot grow without pollen.

If the pollen gets on the stigma, then all goes well. The sticky stigma holds it fast. It finds its way down through the long stem to the little seeds. It nourishes them, and they grow. But if the pollen does not come, the seeds die.

Flowers do not like their own pollen. One lily prefers the pollen from another lily.

It is better for the seeds. But how get this pollen?

Why, ask the hairy-coated bees to bring it, to be sure.

Introduction. 13

And now you see why the flower makes nectar.

It wishes to coax the bees to come. When the bees go down to the bottom of the flower after nectar, they will be sure to get their coats dusty with pollen. Then they fly to another flower, and some of the pollen on their coats is rubbed against the stigma and stuck fast there.

The nectar is always placed so that the bees have to touch the anthers and the stigma of the flower on their way to the feast.

Many flowers have bright lines or spots leading to the nectar that the bee may lose no time in finding it. These are called nectar guides, and you can see them very plainly in the morning-glory.

Many other insects besides bees visit flowers. Butterflies and moths and flies and even some beetles are fond of nectar and pollen, and they all carry pollen about from plant to plant

When insects carry pollen to the stigmas, we say they fertilise the flowers. Unless a flower is fertilized, it will bear no seed.

Bees eat pollen as well as honey, and while gathering it from different flowers they are sure to dust the stigmas.

Flowers can be fertilized only by pollen from other flowers of their own kind. Lilies can be fertilized only by pollen from other lilies, and roses by the pollen of other roses. Lily pollen cannot fertilize a rose, nor can any pollen fertilize any flower but one of its own particular kind.

The three chief parts of a bee are the head, the thorax, and the abdomen.

The head bears the antennae, tongue, and eyes.

The thorax has attached to it the wings and legs.

In the abdomen are the

-^n^sting and the honey-sac

The Bee People.

The Bee People.

i.

APIS MELLIFICA, OR THE HONEY-BEE.

HPHE honey-bees are buzzy, fuzzy little * pepper-pots.

They have pretty, shining wings, but if you so much as touch one of them you will see what happens!

You cannot wonder that they do not like to have you come too near, for they are such little creatures that even a small child must seem to them like a tremendous giant.

How would you like to see a great warm

creature as large as a hill come lumbering

up and try to put a finger the size of a

church steeple upon you? 2 17 i8

The Bee People.

I am sure you would do anything to keep it away, and if you had a good sharp sting you would use it. So we must not blame the Bee People for stinging us.

It is the only way they have of telling us to keep away and let them alone.

They are friendly enough to their own relations, as you will agree when you learn that there are sometimes as many as sixty thousand of them living happily together in one family.

Sometimes we build houses, which we call hives, for them, and sometimes they live in a hollow tree in the woods.

The hives we usually make in these days are square-cornered boxes that can be opened

— "li

Is

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===~ ft

0^

/ hi\

Modern Hives.

The Honey-Bee.

to take out the honey or to attend to the bees. In some parts of the country an oldfashioned hive called a

Bee Gums,

" bee gum " is still used. If you go to the mountains of North Carolina, you will see a great many bee gums. Nearly every cabin has a row of them in its yard, and they are made by chopping down hollow sweetgum trees and cutting off lengths of about three feet.

Sometimes other hollow trees are used, but they are all called "gums." The mountaineers stand the " gum " on a board or a stone, and put another board or stone on top for a roof. All the holes are plastered

The Bee People.

up with mud except those near the bottom, where the bees go in and out. The mud is used to keep out moths, which otherwise might get in and spoil the honey-combs.

A row of bee gums standing beside a log cabin on a mountain-side is very pretty.

A skep is a hive made £>f twisted straw, and in old times was used more than fcjjjfr^ any other, particularly Lin England. skeps. It had a pe-

culiar shape, and to this day when we say a thing is hive-shaped, we mean it is shaped like the skep.

Once in a while honey-bees make their home in the hollow walls of a building, and there is a house in a New England city where bees have lived for a number of years. They are under the roof somewhere, and there they stay safe, and year after

The Honey-Bee, 21

year store up honey which nobody can reach. Stories are told of old houses whose hollow walls, when they were pulled down, were found to be filled with honey-combs. It is not easy to get honey that is stored in the walls of houses, as the bees fight bravely for their property.

Honey-bees are small people, being only about twice as large as common house-flies.

Some are brown all over, and some that were brought here from Italy have tan-colored abdomens, but all of them, the brown bees, the Italian bees, and the other kinds of hive bees in this country, are called by the same name, Apis Mellifica. Apis is the Latin word for bee, and mellifica is the Latin word for honey-making; and they have this pretty name because they make and store up quantities of good honey, which we like to eat.

The Bee People are sun-lovers, and all summer long on bright days you may see them hurrying about. But in the winter-

The Bee People.

time you would look in vain for them, no matter how brightly the sun might shine, for they are the Friends of the Flowers and seldom leave home except when there are blossoms for them to visit.

Many flowers keep a dainty table spread for the bees. Cups of nectar and dishes of ambrosia are ready for them to eat and drink and carry home.

If it were not for these gifts from the flowers, the I honey-bees could not live, as

White Clover, from which a great deal of honey is made.

II. Apis Mellifica And Her Eyes

HERE comes a little brown lady whose name is Apis Mellifica. She is making her wings go so fast that they buzz like a humming-top. Straight as an arrow she goes to that morning-glory flower. All at once the buzzing stops; little Miss Apis has landed feet down and right side up on the nectar guide.

Such great eyes as stare at you when you look her full in the face ! No wonder she saw the. bright flower a long way off and came"^\straighj to it.

She has more eye-space for her sizei than an owl, which is saying a good deal. In fact, her head looks as if it were nearly all eyes, — for two large ones cover the sides. And if you will believe me, in the space between the two large eyes, right on top of her head, are three small ones!

Unless you shave Miss Apis's head you can see but one of (these small eyes at a time, as 'there is a tuft of hairs in front Miss Apis's face, of each, which hides it unless you are looking right down into it. In the picture Miss Apis's head has been shaved.

Five eyes!

But that is not all. Each of her two large eyes is made up of about six thousand three hundred very small ones.

Really, Miss Apis, twelve thousand six hundred and three eyes are a goodly supply for one bee.

It is fortunate that she does not have to keep count of them, for if she counted an

Miss Apis and Her Eyes. 25

eye every second it would take almost four hours to get to the end, without stopping to take a sip of honey, or even to say, Oh, dear me!

How would you like your mother to look at you out of more than twelve thousand eyes when you had been doing something naughty? Two eyes are bad enough at such times. Let us hope that young bees never do wrong.

Just imagine a naughty little bee looking up to find twelve thousand six hundred small eyes and three large ones solemnly staring at his wickedness !

The truth is, all the thousands of small eyes that make up each large eye work together and act as one eye.

Miss Apis's large eyes are called " compound eyes " because they are made of so many small eyes, or "facets."

The facets are so very small that you cannot see them except by the aid of a microscope ; and here is a picture showing you a portion of the eye considerably magnified.

Whoever goes as far as Miss Apis does in search of flowers needs good eyes that can see a long distance. She has been known to fly four or five miles in search of flowers; just think of going, back and forth from hive tog flowers and flowers to hive^ any such distance as that As a rule, however, Miss Apis goes only a little way, half a mile or so, but even for this she needs good, far-seeing eyes.

And she has them, — for her compound eyes are very far-sighted.

This is probably the reason she needs the three small eyes, which are nearsighted and enable her to see things close at hand.

Although she possesses such a prodigious number of eyes, Miss Apis has no eyelids. No, indeed ! she has eye-hairs instead, that point outward and do not prevent her see-

Miss Apis and Her Eyes, 27 ing, but keep dust and pollen from getting into her eyes.

If you look back at the picture of the facets, you will see some of these hairs. She combs her eyes every time she combs her head, and this does not seem at all funny to her, for, you see, she is used to it.

III. Her Tongue

MEANTIME, while we have been gossiping about Miss Apis's eyes, she has gone off.

There she is, just landing in another morning-glory blossom. She strikes the nectar guide as a >^shot strikes the bull's eye, then iC#^4^ 0wn s ^ e tumbles to the M^^^^O^ibottom of the ^ff^ flower.l\^^^^^^\Here are thej^/# nectar/,4, ^^aps^^^k five^*^!^/ of

sweet clear nectar, for it is early in the morning, and Miss Apis is the first to arrive. She wants this nectar to carry home and

make into honey, but how is she going to get her head into the tiny openings that lead to the nectar?

You need not worry about that. She knows what to do, and all at once produces a long shining brown tongue and thrusts it deep down into the nectar. Here is a morning-glory that must v have had an X-ray turned upon it, for we can see right through it to where Miss Apis is reaching her brown tongue down to the nectar.

This tongue is almost as queer as her eyes. Not that she has twelve thousand six hundred tongues. Oh, no; one tongue like hers is quite enough, as you probably will agree when you know r more about it.

.... . . ZJL- --— Enjoying a

It is a long tongue and a - drop of honey. strong tongue, and curls about, lapping up the sweetness, as you can see for yourself if you catch her and give her a drop of honey.

But now she has licked the morning-glory dry and — but what has she done with her tongue ?

It was almost as long as her body a moment ago, and now it is gone.

Miss Apis, what have you done with your tongue?

Where is your tongue, Miss Apis}

MISS APIS, MISS APIS! YOUR TONGUE, MISS APIS?

But she only looks at us out of her twelve thousand six hundred large eyes and her three small eyes, and says not a word.

Her tongue is all right, and she knows how to hold it.

There, she is going to speak I Buzz — b-u-z-z-zz. No, that is her wing music; her tongue is still silent. Off she goes and leaves us in despair concerning it. Now she has deposited herself in another flower — and sure enough — yes — there is that 1-o-n-g, b-r-o-w-n tongue wriggling around in the nectar cup.

I will catch hold of it and pull it, Miss Apis, if you do not tell me what you did with it.

Will you ? she seems to say, solemnly looking at us out of her twelve thousand six hundred and three eyes.

No, we will not, because it is gone again.

I think, in spite of her solemn and owllike looks, she is laughing at us.

Saucy Miss Apis, what do you do with your tongue ?

" I know what you do with yours," she seems to say, and flies off.

But now I know. I saw her do it. She pulled it in, just as you do yours when you have put it out of your mouth. But hers is such a large tongue it could not be pulled into her mouth at all. The best she could do was to pull it up as short as possible, and then fold it back into a nice little groove under her head.

It is a very useful tongue and a very queer one. It has to reach down into long

The Bee People.

flower-cups, and so it must be long. It has to lap up honey, and so it must be flexible. It has to find its way through very small \openings, and so it must be as slender as a thread.

It often has to come into contact with the hard parts of flowers and plants, and so it must be protected.

It is protected by two hard horny tT sheaths, — one covering the upper side of the tongue, (t) ; the other covering the lower side. The lower sheath is made of two long pieces, x, x, that can be separated, as you see in the picture. Each has a little feeler F at the end. Usually they lie side by side with their edges overlapping, underneath the tongue. Theyi make a little trough in which the tongue lies, as you see in this next* T picture. They protect the under side of the tongue.

The upper sheath is also made of two horny pieces Y, Y, that can be separated from each other. They lie side by side when not separated, and their in- ,^ v T'v ner edges overlap, so that they/ form a covering to the upper side of the tongue. So, you see, when the two sheaths are ift their right places they make a tube about the tongue, and the tongue is run out at the point of the sheaths when the bee wants to lick up nectar.

Miss Apis has her tongue-sheath separated into so many parts for a very good reason.

If the sheath were a closed tube, pieces of

honey-comb or grains of pollen or other

substances might get wedged in, when she

was licking up honey or nectar, and give

her a great deal of trouble. But as it is, if

anything gets caught, all she has to do is to

separate the parts of her tongue-sheath and

clear it out.

Miss Apis's tongue is surrounded by rings of hairs which hold fast the nectar and enable her to draw it up into her mouth through the tube made by her tonguesheaths.

The very tip of her tongue is like a little round plate and helps her to lick up the

M^^^k You see by now that Miss

nwP^ -m A P is ' s t° n ? ue is a very sweet I ^^^y| tongue, in fact, a honeyed \ ^W^ I tongue, as we might say. We speak of poets and orators as having honeyed tongues,. but I leave it to you if any^of them can equal Miss Apis in this^

If you look in Miss Apis's face when she is not eating, you cannot see her tongue at all, as it is folded back under her head.

You can see her tightly closed jaws, j, j, and her upper lip, but not her tongue:

Here she has opened her jaws and let her tongue down between them, but you

Miss Apis's Tongue.

can see only the upper sheath and the two little feelers that grow on the points of the lower sheath.

In this next picture she has pushed her tongue out below the sheaths, as she does when licking up honey or nectar that is easily reached.

If the nectar is hard to get at she needs a longer tongue, and therefore shoots the under sheath out below the upper one.

When she does this her tongue is not so fH^ell protected, but ^^)feg it is longer, as you t f\\ [: can see in this next picture.

When the tongue is' not in use, it is drawn up as short as possible, Si ^ f e jj^ and then is folded back f h p e is ^ e g a u d e w ^ into a groove on the folded back, under-side of Miss Apis's head, something as a boy shuts his knife-blade into the handle.

Getting honey is very easy where it is in open cups, but sometimes the flower sweets are in the bottoms of tubes too long for the bee's tongue to reach them.

What is she to do in such a case ? When she smells a delicious meal which she cannot reach, shall she pass by with a sigh because she can not get it? Sometimes Bumbie-Bee. s i ie j s obliged to, but sometimes she is helped by the bumble-bees.

These are much larger than honey-bees; and you will know them because they are covered all over with hair, as if they had on furry coats. Honey-bees have very little hair on the body below the waist. Bumble-bees have broad bands of yellow hairs across their bodies, and sometimes the whole thorax, or part between the head and waist, is bright yellow. Bumble-bees can always be found in red clover fields. Their horny tonguesheaths are larger and stronger than the sheaths of the honey-bee. Indeed, they make quite a strong little dagger with which Madam Bombus, the bumble-bee, can cut a hole in a flower.

When Madam Bombus finds a flower with sweets which she cannot reach without taking too much trouble, she goes to the spot beneath which the sweet she wants is concealed, and, with a downward blow of her convenient dagger, rips open the intervening membrane. Then she unfurls her flag in triumph. In this case her flag is her tongue, you understand. She inserts it in the hole she has made and licks out the sweet juice.

After she is gone, comes the turn of Miss Apis, who puts her tongue through the hole that her larger and stronger friend has made, and takes her share also.

Since the nectaries of the flowers usually fill up as soon as the bees have licked them out, Miss Apis may gd as much honey as though Madam Bombus had not taken any.

It is too bad for the bumble-bee to break into the flowers as she does, and we are almost ashamed of Miss Honey-Bee for following such a bad example.

It is the flowers with spurs that Madam Bombus is most apt to treat in this ungracious/' manner. I myself have seen her goup/ jg||P ^^^ to a tidy little touchme-not cup, and passingstraight by the open door in ^ front, cling to the yellow T '/ spur at the back, which The tidy little holds the nectar, and with no hesitation whatever thrust her sharp little dagger into the spur, slit a hole there, and take out the nectar. It is difficult to believe this of a very respectable-looking being with several thousands of solemn eyes that make her look many times as wise as an owl, but it only proves how little one can rely upon appearances in this world.

It is very unwise for Madam Bombus to do such a thing, as well as very unkind ; for by going* in at the front door she would preserve the lives of the flowers that feed her.

When she goes about slitting open nectaries, she injures not only herself but all her fellow-bees ; for bees carry pollen from flower to flower, as you very well know, and this pollen is necessary to the forming of the seeds. When the bees go into a flower as they ought, they carry some of the pollen that has rubbed off against their hairy bodies to the next flower they visit, which is just what the flowers need. But when they break open the nectaries from the outside, they do not get dusted with pollen, and do not carry it to other flowers. No pollen, no seeds; no seeds, no more plants ; so now you understand why the bees make such a mistake when they cut nectaries open.

The honey-bees seldom do this, not because they are better than the bumble-bees,

4 o

The Bee People.

but because they are not able. Their dagger sheath is not strong enough. I once saw a honey-bee try very hard to cut a hole in the long tube of a purple azalea. She could not reach the nectar from the front of the flower, because the tube was too long and slender, so she tried to break in the back way. But she could not do it, and all the azalea nectar she got she sucked out of holes which the bumble-bees had made in some of the flowers. The az /alea did not make

honey for the bees;

its long and slender

tube was fitted to

the tongues of large

moths and butterflies.

IV. Her Honey-sac

WHAT do you suppose becomes of the nectar Miss Apis gathers with her hairy tongue ? She swallows it, you say, and that is true. She does swallow it, but that is not the end of the story. When it is swallowed, it passes into a little honey-sac which is not as large as a sweet-pea seed, and which is* so delicate that it looks like a little soapbubble.

This honey-sac is in the big end of the abdomen, and in the picture it is shown by a dotted circle. It holds less than a drop of nectar, and we may call it the jug or bottle in which Miss Apis carries the blossom

nectar home ; for she does not swallow 41 it for her own use, but that she may bear it to the hive for the baby bees to eat.

You can see this honey-sac by feeding a hive bee as much as she wants, and then letting her fly to the window. The light shining through the delicate body makes the clear honey in her little "bottle" plainly visible. The Italian honey-bees, whose abdomens are a light tan color, at the upper end, show the honey-drop better than the common brown bees.

Some of the honey passes on into the true stomach of the bee, which is just beyond the honey-sac, and is digested ; but the most of it Miss Apis carries to the hive in her honey-sac.

It is curious that everything Miss Apis eats has to be swallowed into the honey-sac before it can get into the stomach, and yet the honey is always clear and pure. Honey and pollen go together into the honey-sac, yet the honey in the comb contains almost no pollen.

Miss Apis's Honey-Sac. 43

The reason is, Miss Apis strains her honey before she puts it in the comb.

In her honey-sac is a little strainer which is very wonderful and very beautiful.

It looks, as you can see in the picture, something like a flower-bud. Honey and pollen grains go together mio/C^2\ the honey-sac, but they : do not stay together, for the ' pollen grains are gathered up by the adion of muscles in the walls of the honey-sac, and passed through the strainer into the stomach. The strainer opens its mouth to let them pass, but as soon as they have done so, it closes. Of course quite a good deal of nectar passes through with the pollen, but this is squeezed back by the muscles of the stomach into the honey-sac through the closed mouth of the strainer. The mouth of the strainer is fringed with hairs that point backwards and cross each other when the strainer mouth is closed. So, though the nectar can squeeze through,

The Bee People.

the pollen grains cannot. They are kept back in the stomach by this clever little strainer, and only pure nectar or honey can get back into the honey-sac.

When Miss Apis gets to the hive, she makes the muscles of her honey-sac squeeze the honey into her mouth, and she then puts it into the honey-comb.

Miss Apis swallows nectar, as the sweet juice of the flowers is called, but when we take ho JSkney from the honey-comb, it

dergone a change and

is no longer nectar, but

honey. In some way the

nectar has been changed

and

honey into

V. Mbrosia And Nectar

OF course no one, not even Miss Apis nor the lovely Venus herself, could live entirely upon nectar.

We know that the gods and goddesses, when they had a party on Mount Olympus, always had ambrosia as well as nectar.

They sat around and had it passed to them by the graceful goddess Hebe. She was as beautiful as the springtime, and I have no doubt they often ate and drank more than was good for them, just for the sake of having her bring them one more cup of nectar or one more slice of ambrosia.

The nectar of the gods was like honey ; some say that nine-tenths of it was honey.

Just what ambrosia was, I am not able to say, but I suppose it was like the best bread that ever was made on earth, only a great deal better; and like the most delicious cake that ever was concocted for Christmas time, only a great deal more delicious ; and like all the bonbons and good things rolled into one, only a great deal sweeter and finer than anything we can possibly imagine.