Page 36 - The Miracle of the Honeybee

34 THE MIRACLE OF THE HONEYBEE

bread, they are given different food:
2) Newly-hatched larvae are given a kind of milk that the worker bees
secrete. When the worker bees are six days old, a pair of glands on their
heads go into action. These organs, known as the hypopharyngeal glands,
secrete a very special substance known as “royal jelly,” whose properties
have astonished scientists. This is because whether a larva turns into a
queen bee or a worker depends on whether it’s fed this substance which
the workers secrete. The nurse bees feed royal jelly to the larvae only for
the first three days after hatching from their eggs; after which, as we have
seen above, the larvae are then fed on bee bread.
However, bee bread is never fed to a larva that is intended to turn into
a queen. Unlike other larvae, future queens are fed on royal jelly through-
out their larval stage. 18

Third Stage: Construction

Starting on their tenth day, the bees leave the hive for the first time and
familiarize themselves with the world outside. At this point, the wax
glands on the bees’ abdomens begin to develop, maturing on the twelfth
19
day and becoming ready to produce wax. The activities of the hypopha-
ryngeal glands have now been halted. Now 12 days old, the workers stop
feeding the young and set about constructing honeycombs consisting of
identical hexagonal cells. (Since this is a particularly complex procedure,
we’ll examine it in detail later in this book.)
There is no need for the bees to constantly build combs in their hive.
They construct them only when the site they live in fails to respond to re-
quirements or when they migrate elsewhere. Apart from that, they gener-
ally use wax to repair the combs—a task that does not take up that much
time. During this period, the bees perform three other very important jobs.
Two of these involve distributing foodstuffs—pollen and nectar—col-
lected from the outside to the other bees and storing them in the comb
cells. The bees take the honey from the nectar-gathering bees on their re-
turn to the hive, divide it among their hungry fellows as appropriate, and
store the rest in honeycombs. 20