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The Worker: Bees

To-day bees sometimes store bee-bread in the sections. designed by the bee-keeper for pure honey, or they may even put brood in them, but where this happens the sections are not sold and the public is none the wiser. Bees are thirsty souls and will fly long distances for water if it is not obtainable near home. They take it to the hive, probably to help in preparing food for the young. The writer recalls a glass tank of water plants standing on the piazza of a Florida house where bees were always to be seen in crowds, sitting on the floating leaves, clinging to the stalks of the papyrus and edging the rim of the little aquarium.

The most troublesome cargo the bee carries is a sort of glue or resin called propolis with which it insists upon daubing over the whole inside of the hive.

This sticky stuff is quite as troublesome to the beekeeper as to the bee. The keeper takes pains to have the hives tight and clean, the bee takes pains to daub everything over with propolis, spoiling the appearance of the pretty white boxes provided for the honey-comb and fastening everything tight and fast so that when the keeper attempts to remove a section of honey ten to one he finds it carefully glued fast to everything it touches, unless he is on the watch to take it before the bee gets around to the gluing act.

Bees mix propolis with wax to strengthen the cells, chink up every crevice and cranny, and if they are allowed will oftentimes carefully varnish over the whole surface of the newly capped comb, spoiling its looks and ruining its sale.

In old, loose-jointed hives and in tree-trunks the propolis is necessary to stop up holes and make the hive warm and snug for the winter, but in the well-made modern hive it is a decided nuisance, excepting in cases of defence.

When a hive is attacked by robber-bees or more particularly by moths, the colony will often defend itself by barricades built of propolis before the entrance, making this so small that a moth cannot enter.

It was from this use of the substance that it received its name of "propolis," meaning "before the city.".

When bees build defences of propolis to prevent robber bees from entering, they contract the hive entrance so that but one bee can pass at a time, when the guards can take care of the robbers.

Bees have been known to cover glass hives with propolis doubtless to expel the light - thus rendering them useless for purposes of observation. - The bees get propolis from the covering of varnish on the buds of some trees, but they are not particular, eagerly collecting their troublesome glue from pitch, resin, varnish or any similar substance they can find.

Darwin tells us in the "Origin of Species”: "Andrew Knight observed that his bees, instead of laboriously collecting propolis, used a cement of wax and turpentine, with which he had covered decorticated trees."