Besides honey, bees make use of wax to construct combs, bee-bread for larvæ food, and propolis for glue. If you think the bees gather honey from the flowers you are greatly mistaken. Nobody knows yet quite how honey is made. Chemists say that it has in it water, grape sugar, a little formic acid, some mineral matter, albuminoids, and essential oils. But this list leaves us little the wiser. No chemist has been able to combine these materials into honey. The nectar gathered by bees passes directly into a receptacle, the honey-sack or honey-stomach, which is used for that purpose only. It does not go the same road as the bee's food. The notion that bees swallow the nectar and then unswallow it is as erroneous as it is unappetizing. The flavour, body, and colour of honey depend on the source of the nectar, the age, the amount of chemical change wrought by the bees, and the completeness of the ripening process which goes on in the hive before the cells are capped. Honey is a very wholesome sweet, far more easily digested than cane or grape sugar. If the making of honey is mysterious, what can we say of wax production? In the height of the honey season we can watch the bees making wax through a glass-sided hive. Mrs. Comstock says: "A certain number of self-elected citizens gorge themselves with honey and hang up in chains or curtains, each bee clinging by her front feet to the hind feet of the one above her, like Japanese acrobats; and there they remain sometimes for two days until the wax scales appear pushed out from every pocket." Sometimes a honey-and pollen-laden bee will come home from pasture with flakes of wax exuding from the wax plates on her abdomen. But this happens only when wax is needed for comb making. At other times no amount of honey gorging will produce a scrap of wax. Does this not hint at mystery and something higher than mere intelligence? You would think in such a perfectly organized community there would be something like specialization. Such appears not to be the case. All the workers seem to do all the different kinds of things. Let us say a bee goes out and gets a load of honey the first thing in the morning. When she comes in she goes to the comb to deposit her honey, then to the brood cells where she combs the pollen off her legs into a cell where it is stored to feed the young bees later. Perhaps she sees in passing some cells which need capping, does that, then away to gorge herself with honey and make wax, then builds her own or her neighbour's wax onto the comb. If the day is hot it may occur to her and a thousand others to construct a living fan and keep the air stirring inside the hive by waving their wings. In a system like this there is no resting, no play, no shirking, no specializing. There is always work to do and always somebody doing it with a will in the perfect socialism.