Then the work of the nursing bees begins. In
two or three days each egg has become a tiny maggot
or larva, and the nursing bees put into its cell a
mixture of pollen and honey which they have prepared
in their own mouths, thus making a kind of sweet bath
in which the larva lies. In five or six days the
larva grows so fat upon this that it nearly fills
the cell, and then the bees seal up the mouth of the
cell with a thin cover of wax, made of little rings
and with a tiny hole in the centre.
As soon as the larva is covered in, it begins to give
out from its under-lip a whitish, silken film, made
of two threads of silk glued together, and with this
it spins a covering or cocoon all round itself, and
so it remains for about ten days more. At last,
just twenty-one days after the egg was laid, the young
bee is quite perfect, lying in the cell as in Fig.
57, and she begins to eat her way through the cocoon
and through the waxen lid, and scrambles out of her
cell. Then the nurses come again to her, stroke
her wings and feed her for twenty-four hours, and after
that she is quite ready to begin work, and flies out
to gather honey and pollen like the rest of the workers.
By this time the number of working bees in the hive
is becoming very great, and the storing of honey
and pollen-dust goes on very quickly. Even the
empty cells which the young bees have left are cleaned
out by the nurses and filled with honey; and this
honey is darker than that stored in clean cells, and
which we always call “virgin honey” because
it is so pure and clear.
At last, after six weeks, the queen leaves off laying
worker-eggs, and begins to lay, in some rather larger
cells, eggs from which drones, or male bees, will
grow up in about twenty days. Meanwhile the worker-bees
have been building on the edge of the cones some very
curious cells (q, Fig. 57) which look like thimbles
hanging with the open side upwards, and about every
three days the queen stops in laying drone-eggs and
goes to put an egg in one of these cells. Notice
that she waits three days between each of these peculiar
layings, because we shall see presently that there
is a good reason for her doing so.
The nursing bees take great care of these eggs, and
instead of putting ordinary food into the cell, they
fill it with a sweet, pungent jelly, for this larva
is to become a princess and a future queen bee.
Curiously enough, it seems to be the peculiar food
and the size of the cell which makes the larva grow
into a mother-bee which can lay eggs, for if a hive
has the misfortune to lose its queen, they take one
of the ordinary worker-larvae and put it into a royal
cell and feed it with jelly, and it becomes a queen-bee.
As soon as the princess is shut in like the others,
she begins to spin her cocoon, but she does not quite
close it as the other bees do, but leaves a hole at
the top.
