Chitine is indeed a wonderful substance, and is found in all forms and shapes, having a variety of appearances. The hard black bodies of beetles are composed of it, and, wonderful to relate, of this substance the downy wings of the butterfly are made. You will remember that in the chapter on the eye of the bee we saw that the facets have a beautiful appearance; they too are made of chitine, as are the tendons, legs, hairs, membranes, and many other parts of the body. The abdomen of the queen and of the worker is divided into six rings or belts, but the drone, having a somewhat larger body, has seven. Each ring is divided again into two parts which are known as the _scelerites_, which are joined one to another by delicate membranes of very fine skin. You may have noticed that the leg of a crab is jointed, and that the hard outer case of shell gives place to a fine, but tough membrane at the joints. By means of this arrangement the crab can move its leg with ease. The joints of the abdomen of the bee are arranged in a similar manner, although in this case the membranes are of course much finer and more delicate than those of the crab. The organs inside the outer case of chitine are of most wonderful and delicate construction. You may be surprised and interested to learn that a bee has two stomachs, and these are perhaps the most important parts of the abdomen. It is not because the bee is a greedy insect that it is provided with two stomachs, but each serves a separate and useful purpose. One is called the honey-sac, and the other is the stomach proper. As a bee sips the nectar from a flower, it is passed down a tube through the thorax into the honey-sac, which acts as a kind of store-chamber. Here it is kept until the bee flies back to the hive, or until the little worker may need it for its own food. Leading from the honey-sac to the stomach is a very fine tube, and at the honey-sac end of it there is a kind of stopper, called the “stomach mouth.” Just as we can open or close our mouths at will, so can the bee open or close the stomach mouth, and so either allow honey to flow into its true stomach or keep it stored in the honey-sac. The latter is very tiny, and when quite full contains little more than a third of an ordinary drop of honey. The tube which leads from the one to the other is lined with fine hairs, all pointing in a downward direction, away from the honey-sac. When the bee sips the nectar it often happens that some of the pollen grains from the flower are taken in also. Now the bee desires to gather only the pure nectar, and so it passes the nectar from the honey-sac to the stomach by means of the tube. It then makes the honey return from the stomach to the honey-sac, but this time the hairs in the tube act as a strainer, and prevent the pollen grains from returning with the nectar. By this clever little apparatus you will see that the bee is able to strain the nectar when flying from one