A honey-bee community, living in hollow tree or hive, includes a queen or fertile female, a few hundred drones or fertile males, and ten to forty thousand workers, infertile females (fig. 80). The number of drones and workers varies, being smallest in winter. Each kind of individual has a certain particular part of the work of the whole community to do; the queen lays all the eggs, that is, is the mother of the entire community; the drones act simply as the royal consorts, fertilizing the eggs; while the workers build the comb, produce the wax from which the cells are constructed, bring in all the food consisting of flower-pollen and nectar, care for the young bees, fight off intruders, and in fact perform all the many labors and industries of the community except those of reproduction. There is a certain not very well understood and perhaps not very sharply defined division of these labors among the worker individuals, the younger ones acting specially as "nurses," feeding and caring for the young bees (larvæ and pupæ), the older ones making the food-gathering expeditions. The queen lays her eggs one in each of many cells (fig. 81). These eggs hatch in three days, and the young bee appears as a white, soft, footless, helpless grub or larva that is fed at first by the nurses with a highly nutritious substance called bee-jelly which the nurses make in their stomachs and regurgitate for the larva. After two or three days of this feeding the larvæ are fed pollen and honey. After a few days a small mass of this food is put into the cell, which is then "capped" or covered with wax. The larva after using up this food-supply pupates, and lies quiescent in the pupal stage for thirteen days, when the fully developed bee issues, and breaking through the wax cap of the cell is ready for the labors which are immediately assigned it. The bee with the kind of life-history just described is a worker. It has been demonstrated that the eggs which produce workers and those which produce queens do not differ, but if the workers desire to have a queen produced they tear down two or three cells around some one cell, enlarging this latter into a large vase-shaped cell. When the larva hatches from the egg in this cell it is fed for its whole larval life with bee-jelly. From the pupa into which this larva transforms issues not a worker but a new queen. The eggs which produce drones or males differ from those which produce queens and workers in being unfertilized, the queen having the power to lay either fertilized or unfertilized eggs. When a new queen appears or when several appear at once there is great excitement in the community. If several appear they fight among themselves until only one survives. It is said that a queen never uses its sting except against another queen. The old queen now leaves the hive accompanied by many of the workers. She and her followers fly away together, finally alighting on some tree-branch and massing there in a dense swarm. This