Next comes the queen, the mistress of the hive. You can easily recognize her, too, for her body is much longer and more slender than that of the other bees, and her folded wings are always crossed at the tips. The other bees treat her with the greatest respect, never, for example, turning their backs toward her. And wherever she goes a number of them bear her company, forming a circle round her, in readiness to feed her, or lick her with their tongues, or do anything else for her that she may happen to want. Her chief business is to lay eggs; and she often lays two or three hundred in the course of a single day. Lastly, there are the workers. There are many thousands of these, and they have to do all the work of the hive, making wax and honey, building the combs, and feeding and tending the young. The comb is made of six-sided cells, and is double, two sets of cells being placed back to back. Some of these cells are used for storing up honey. But a great many of them are nurseries, so to speak, in which the grubs are brought up. These grubs are quite helpless, and the nurse-bees have to come and put food into their mouths several times a day. Fastened to the outside of the combs, there are always several cells of quite a different shape. They are almost like pears in form, with the smaller ends downward. These are the royal nurseries in which the queen grubs are brought up. Bees feed their little ones with a curious kind of jelly, made partly of honey and partly of the pollen of flowers. This is called bee-bread; and it is rather strange to find that one kind of bee-bread is given to the grubs of the drones and the workers, while quite a different kind is given to those of the queens. You will want, of course, to know something about the sting of the bee--though perhaps you already know enough of the pain it can give! This is a soft organ, enclosed in a horny sheath, with a number of little barbs at the tip. When a bee stings us, it is often unable to draw the sting out again, because of these barbs. So it is left behind in the wound, and its loss injures the body of the insect so severely that the bee very soon dies. The poison is stored up in a little bag at the base of the sting, which is arranged in such a way that when the sting is used a tiny drop of poison is forced through it, and so enters the wound. Then, no doubt, you would like to know how bees make honey; but that neither we nor any one can tell you. All we know is, that the bee sweeps out the sweet juices of flowers with its odd brush-like tongue and swallows them; that they pass into a little bag just inside the hind part of its body, which we call the honey-bag; and that by the time the bee reaches the hive they have been turned into honey. But how or why the change takes place no one knows at all. Bumblebees, or humblebees, are also social bees; but their nests are not quite as wonderful as those of the hive-bee, and their combs are not so cleverly made.