THE APIARY.

Otago Witness, Issue 3842, 1 November 1927, Page 11

THE APIARY.

By

J. A.

LIFE HISTORY OF THE WORKER BEE. . J continue last week’s article on the inhabitants of the hive. It was stated that the bee was somewhat of a socialist, and that it delegated even its breeding to one individual specially endowed for that purpose. That lady is called the queen, but we will speak of her under a separate heading. The worker right at the beginning loses her one great opportunitv of greatness. It the other workers wish to make her a queen they can do sos but the chapees are less than one in a hundred thousand. Perhaps it is just as well that she misses it, for not more than one m a dozen of the queens raised ever reach the royal position and mother the hive. By the bees giving her a narrow cradle and restricting her food supply her ovaries remain undeveloped, her power of fecundity is lost, and it seems a ?. ' V r|, s h e a^so loses her individuality. bhe becomes just a unit in the hive, with no ambition beyond that of adding to the general store. In her apprenticeship and while her wings are gathering strength her work is to teed others in their pinched cells by giving them a predigested mixture of honey and pollen. Later, when about a tortnight old, 'let more active career outs ,? begins—first by gathering mainly pollen, but later doing more in nectar. By the end of about four weeks her wings become frayed, her abdomen has its downy coat worn off, and she becomes glossy and old looking. She has done her bit and disappears.

A summary of her life is something like this: On the third day after the egg is laid it hatches a tiny larva, curled round in the bottom of the cell in food already placed there by the feeders. Five days later t—e larva has grown to a size that fills the cell, and is then capped over with wax capping. and left to pupate. On the twenty-first day the young bee with her mandibles cuts this capping round the edge and pulls herself out of the cell, a downv. but perfectly furnished, worker bee. She gets no attention from the other bees, for births in the hive, being at the rate of 1000 to 2000 per day, become very 'common. Immediately, however, instinct guides her as to the future, and her first movement is to find an open cell of honey and to satisfy her hunger, then to congregate with others of like age in the middle of the brood-nest, and as strength comes begin the work of feeding the young larvae. It is the crush of these young bees' congregating on the brood combs that is now regarded as the prime cause of swarming.

It is an interesting experiment for a beginner in bee culture to introduce a yellow Italian queen into a black colony, destroying the old black queen at the time of introduction. It will be found that in three weeks the last of the old queen’s laying will be hatching out, while at the same time, or nearly so, the first young Italians will begin to show. Six weeks later an examination will show that the whole colony is Italian and that thj blacks have all but entirely disappeared. THE QUEEN. Any fertilised egg of the thousands that the old queen mother is laying can be developed into a queen by the simple process of giving a more roomy cell and supplying in unlimited quantity what beekeepers call royal jelly. The young larva simply remains curled up in jelly, and so copious is the quantity given that when the fully developed queen cuts her way out of the l? 11 there are still some remains of the food left. The effect, of this treatment is to give fuller development to the ovaries, and, also, rather strange to say, to do it in five davs’ less time than it takes to develop a worker' On the sixteenth day from the egg the queen is due to hatch. Unlike the worker bee, the young hatching queen receives a good deal of attention. Her cell is often thickly coated over with wax, but when the time is nearly due for her to hatch the top of the cell is thinned down. If when the capping is cut by the hatching queen the hive is not ready for her, the bees will often seal down the capping again and make her a prisoner, mounting a guard so that she may not get loose in the hive until they are ready. This may be in anticipation of a swarm leaving which has been detained by the weather. When the young queen has hatched she is very active in her hunt to see that the hive contains no rival, and will destroy all the unhatched queens unless these are guarded by the bees in anticipation of sending out a further swarm. Beekeepers nowadays take advantage of the knowledge they have gained of the life history of the queen to do improved breeding by the transfer of young larvae from improved stock to the cells built’ by the bees, so replacing the bees’ own selection, -which is -removed. An instance of how this is done, and of which the writer has probably spoken before,' is shown in an experience of many years ago. Mr R. Gibb the writer sent to U.S.A, for a dozen queens by post. Only one arrived alive, which Mr Gibb introduced into his apiary. Afterwards, when the queen was laying, the writer, as required, got portions .of corrtb.containi g eggs of the required age, and from these requeened his whole apiary. So the one bee became the queen mother of an apiary.