Both the honey gatherers and the pollen carriers know exactly in which direction to fly and where to go as soon as they have filled their sacs with honey or their baskets with pollen.

The honeybee lifts herself from the flower on her four shining little wings. Up, up she sails into the air, so fast that it is hard to see where she goes. Soon she is just a tiny black speck against the blue sky, making a straight "bee line" for home.

There is no danger of her going to the wrong hive, even if there is another one only two feet away. A bee always finds her way back to her own home, because she remembers certain landmarks - such as trees or other hives, perhaps. At any rate, she always knows the exact location of her home.

Across the lower end of the hive is a long narrow opening crowded with bees flying in and out. The honey gatherer hurries in through this doorway.

How dark it is inside! Bees are scurrying around, all busy at different tasks. Every bee seems to know just what to do, and does it. Some are nurses, some clean house, some make beeswax and honeycomb. Other bees gather honey and pollen and "bee glue. " Bee glue is a sticky sap which bees take from the leaf buds of trees and use to varnish certain parts of the hive. They also mix it with wax to patch up cracks and to fasten things together.

The Entrance to the Hive Is Crowded with Bees

Honeybees are fine housekeepers. Everything inside the hive is kept neat and shining, for bees are clean in every way. Even when they grow old they use their last strength to fly outside, where they fall down and die in the grass. If injured, a bee will crawl outside the hive to die, or if she is not able to do this, her sisters will carry her out.

In very hot weather some worker bees stand outside the entrance, fanning very fast with their wings to ventilate the hive and to help thicken the honey. Others stand guard at the entrance. How fierce they are when stranger bees from another hive try to get in to steal their honey! They can always discover strangers by their different odor. Like dogs, bees have a keen sense of smell. They always know members of their own colony, too, because all the bees of one hive have the same odor.

All workers have stings with which to guard their honey and their brood. But because a worker bee has only one sting in her body, she does not sting a robber bee unless there is no other way to get rid of her. A bee's sting, which is on the tail end of her body, has a barb on the end, something like an arrowhead. It is easy for the bee to push the sting in, but once hooked in, the bee cannot pull it out again. It is torn out of her body as she flies away, and she dies from the injury.

The inside of a beehive is almost filled with combs. There are usually ten of them to a hive, hung down from the top, with the narrow ends toward the entrance. Both sides of the combs look as though they were full of holes, since they are made up of thousands of little cup-like rooms or cells, fitted closely together. Each cell has six sides and is perfectly regular in form. These cells, so perfect both in size and form, are made of beeswax, thin as tissue paper, yet strong enough to hold the weight of many pounds of honey. Making these cells is one of the most wonderful things that bees do.

First, the worker bees make the wax. To do this, they eat their fill of honey. Certain glands inside their bodies turn this honey into wax. Then these wax-making bees hang together from the top of the hive like a thick curtain in the empty space where they are going to build the comb. The wax comes out in thin soft scales from narrow openings on the under side of their bodies. The bees, working together, mold this wax into cells with their jaws and feet, fastening one cell to another until they have the size comb they want. They begin at the top, adding cell after cell. Gradually they extend the comb downward and to the sides. A comb is about an inch thick, and the cells face out on both sides of the comb, back to back, so the bottom of each little cell comes up against the bottom of another cell on the other side of the comb.

The Bees Mold the Wax into Cells with Their Jaws and Feet

Between the combs the bees leave a quarter-inch space for a narrow hallway, so that they will have room to pass one another as they travel from comb to comb. The combs are white when they are first made. They become darker with age and use, but although dark, they are kept spotlessly clean.

In a busy hive the cells in the combs hanging nearest the side walls are brimming full of honey. The bees have covered the tops of some of these cells with wax caps to preserve the honey and to keep it clean. Next to the combs with cells filled with honey are other combs with cells full, or partly full, of pollen. The combs in the center of the hive are filled mostly with "brood eggs" and unhatched bees. There are a great many cells filled with eggs. These eggs will become worker bees in twenty-one days. In other cells are bees in the worm stage, called "larvae" (usually pronounced lar-vee). The larvae look like pearly white worms. In still other cells the worms are turning into baby bees inside the cocoons they have spun around themselves. The worker bees have covered the cocoon cells with wax caps. When the larvae inside the cocoons have changed and grown into baby bees, they break open the caps and come out into the world.