So good Mrs. Bee is not gathering honey and pollen bee-flour to “gobble” them up, but is going to pack much of them away for the use of the bees who will live over winter, and for the baby bees, and for the male bees who have no way of gathering food from the flowers for themselves. THE BEE CITY A Beehive city is a wonderfully busy place. From twenty thousand to forty thousand, or more, inhabitants live in the Bee City, so no wonder it is a busy place. You would think that everything would be in confusion, but on the contrary everything is in marvelous law and order. Every inhabitant knows just what part it is expected to do, and each kind of inhabitant is particularly fitted to do its own particular part. {A Queen Bee, In every Beehive City there are {Many Worker Bees, {Quite a number of Drone Bees. THE QUEEN BEE The Queen Bee is the mother bee, and it is her duty to lay eggs, out of which Baby Bees are hatched. WORKER BEES The Worker Bees do the work of the Beehive City. They gather food, and feed and care for the inhabitants, and keep the city clean. DRONE BEES The Drone or male Bees do not work. Their bodies help keep the hive warm, but they cannot do any real work. One of them is the husband of the Queen Bee, but after she first marries him she doesn’t pay any attention to him. She is too busy laying eggs in the cradle cells the Worker Bees have made. WHY THE WORKERS KILL THE DRONES Yes, it is expensive to feed the Drone Bees, and when the weather begins to turn cool, perhaps in September or October, the Worker Bees who up to that time have cared for the Drones, begin to rid the Hive City of them. They bite off their wings, and bite them in half sometimes—anything to kill them or send them away. No, it is not as cruel as it sounds, for you see, if Drone Bees kept on living they would eat up the honey which is so much needed in the Winter by the Worker Bees and the Queen who live over to care for the new Baby Bees in the Spring. THE WONDERFUL BODIES OF THE BEES Now, each different kind of honey bee has a body which is particularly fitted to the work it has to perform. THE BODY OF THE WORKER BEE The Worker Bee, the one you see so often on flowers, has a body made especially for the kind it is to do. It has many excellent eyes which look to you like but two eyes, unless you see them under the magnifying glass, and wonderful an-ten-næ, and a tongue in its head. The antennæ are its horn-like feelers, and they resemble your arms in the way they reach out, and examine objects by “handling” them. THE ANTENNÆ