ABOUT HONEY BEES by G. W. Demaree

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Oct 28, 1889

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 15, No. 41.

ABOUT HONEY BEES.

By G. W. Demaree

I HAVE seen a single bee clinging to a smoothly-dressed board with its front feet, and supporting a living chain of twenty-five bees, thus supporting twenty-five times her own weight, for an indefinite time. There was a time when I was puzzled to know how the bee could hold onto the smooth board and sustain such a weight. But the magnifying glass reveals a finely curved claw at the extremity of each of the front pair of legs, and these enable the bee to cling to the wood in any position, with its back down as well as otherwise.

But how does the bee manage to run up a pane of glass or a sheet of polished metal? Her sharp claws will not serve her in this case. Well, nature has provided for that in a wonderful way. I once had a theory to account for this wonderful feat. But when I commenced to study the anatomy of the bee under the magnifying glass, my theory was found to be wide of the mark. The glass shows an infinitesimal gland in the soles of the feet, which secrete a mucilaginous substance of sufficient tenacity to enable the bee to cling to the smoothest surface that it is likely to come in contact with.

The mandible (jaw) of the honey bee, when seen under the glass, is a real curiosity. They not only open and shut, like the jaws of any other animal, but they have a backward and forward movement, and each of the pair is independent of the other in its movements. The old class of naturalists believed that the honey bee, as an artist and a builder, was a "mason." But such is not the fact in the case. The honey bee is a "smith." She draws out her work, using her mandibles in the place of the smith's hammer. It would be a simple impossibility to build a wall as thin as that of the honeycomb by any other process.

Beeswax is the result of digested honey, just as tallow results from the digestion of the food of the ox. But the beeswax, instead of adhering to the flesh, as in the case of fat animals, passes out of the body of the bee, through one of the six false pockets on the under side of the abdomen, in the form of thin scales or pellets, and while they are warm and pliable the bees seize them with their mandibles and weld them to the rims of the cells, and continue to draw out the combs until the proper depth of the cells is reached.

The cell walls are as thin as the finest tissue paper known to the art of paper making, and would not have sufficient strength to support the tiny weight of a tiny bee were they not strengthened by an exquisitely formed rim around them, supporting their frail walls below, precisely as does the wired rim around the top of a tin vessel. That these thin walls are drawn out and not built onto, is proven by the fact that the rim around the cell is as well defined when the work is first begun as it is when the comb is finished, and is present through the whole process of construction.—G. W. Demaree.