THE EVOLUTION OF THE BEE AND THE BEEHIVE
the queen will lay three thousand to four thousand eggs every four and twenty hours, and in the course of her life of four or five years she produces hundreds of thousands of eggs. But should the number of bees in the hive decrease she will cease laying eggs, as there will not then be sufficient workers to attend the resultant larvae.
As soon as an egg is placed in a cell the worker bees get busy. They push their heads into the cell and seem to do something to the egg, though what it is is not clearly known. Within three or four days a very small white maggot-like grub (Fig. 8) emerges from the eggshell. It has no legs and is devoid of everything we associate with insects—it has no wings, no stings, no feelers, no eyes, and its intestine ends blindly.
For the first day or two the young larvae are fed from the secretion of the salivary glands of the workers. This is known as pap, or “royal jelly.” The larvae not only lap this up, but float in it. On the fourth day this food is mixed with honey, and henceforward the drones are completely weaned and feed entirely on honey and pollen. The queen bee, on the other hand, lives on nothing but royal pap. After about six days the larvae cease to feed. They are then sealed up in their cells (see Fig. 8) by the worker bees and each larva makes a cocoon case, in which it forms a chrysalis or pupa.
After a few more days the young bee emerges from the cocoon and commences to gnaw her way through the waxen covering of her cell. In this she is aided by numerous workers, who hurry up from outside, and as soon as she staggers into the darkness, the heat, and the bustle of the hive, these workers arrange her hair, clean her, and offer her honey to eat. But she has undergone a kind of resurrection and is at first bewildered, trembling and feeble. However, she soon
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