=Metamorphosis.=--The metamorphosis, or change of form, which occurs in the early life history of the bee is among the most interesting in the insect world. When the egg is deposited by the queen, it rests on end on the bottom of the cell and almost parallel with the sides. At the close of the first day it inclines to an angle of about 45°, and after two days it falls to the floor of the cell. As a rule, the period of incubation is three days, and the grub is immediately taken charge of by the nurse bees, and fed according to the kind of cell in which it has been placed. At the end of five or six days the grub is sealed up in its cell to undergo the next, or pupa, stage of its existence. Generally speaking, the queen is ready to leave her cell on the fifteenth day, the worker on the twenty-first, and the drone on the twenty-fourth day from the time the egg is laid. If the weather is cold these periods may be extended: it is a curious fact that the egg of an insect can often bear a greater intensity of cold without injury than can the developed insect. =Anatomy of the Bee.=--It is advisable that all bee-keepers should know something of the structure of the bee, of its principal organs and their functions. The subject is too technical to be dealt with at length in a volume such as this, but the following notes may be of sufficient service to rouse interest to further inquiry. =Tracheæ.=--Bees have no lungs, but in place of them have air-sacs, connected up by air-tubes or _tracheæ_ which run throughout the body, varying in size much as do the "veins" of a leaf, until they are minute enough to serve the extremities of the insect, the antennae and sting. This arrangement of the air-supplying organs, general throughout the insect world, may have something to do with the hibernation, to which most are subject in a greater or less degree, in cold weather. The worker-bee is extremely sensitive to cold, but the queen seems far less susceptible, and often causes perceptible anxiety in a hive by wandering out of the cluster in cold weather. I know of one instance which came under my notice where the queen was very much alive in a hive in which all the workers were dead, or dying from starvation in cold weather, and although it is a recognised fact that queens which have been injured by frost become drone-breeders it was not so in this case. =The Antennæ.=--The antennae of the bee must be accounted among the most marvellous of its organs. They are made up of a number of joints and chambers, and, though they are conjectured to be the organs of the senses of hearing, feeling, and smelling they are not definitely so known to be. As in the case of many other insects the antennæ of the male bee are much longer than those of the female.