beel (be)

[Early mod. E. also be, pl. bees and been, IMG:content-1842.png:[ocr errors] It is also found wild in great numbers (now especially in North America, where the bee was introduced by the European colonists), storing honey in hollow trees or in other suitable situations. It lives in swarms or societies of from 10,000 50,000 individuals. These bees-the perfect females or queen bees, the males or drones, and the imperfect or undeveloped females, called neuters, constituting the working bees. In each hive or swarm there is only one female or queen, whose sole office is to propagate the species. The queen is much larger than the other bees. When she dies, a Honey-bee ( Apis mell i fica ). Queen. young working bee three days old is selected, its cell is enlarged by breaking down the partitions, its food is changed to royal jelly or paste, and it grows into a queen. The queen lays 2,000 eggs a day. The drones serve merely Neuter, or Worker. for impregnating the queen, which they are destroyed by the neuters. These last are the laborers of the hive. They collect the honey, form the cells, and feed the other bees and the young. They are furnished with a proboscis by which they suck the honey from flowers, and a mouth by which they swallow it, conveying it then to the hive in their stomachs, whence they dis gorge it into the cells. The pollen of flowers settles on the hairs with which their body is covered, whence it is collected into pellets by a brush on their second pair of legs, and deposited in a hollow in the third pair. It is beech mon bee, A. mellific a, there are the A. fasci cat a, dome ticated in Egypt; the A. ligustica, or Ligurian bee of Italy and Greece, introduced generally into apiaries in other lands; the A. unicolor of Madagascar; the A. indica, etc. 2. Any aculeate hymenopterous insect of the division Mellifera or An tho phil a, comprising the families Apida and Andrenida, and in cluding in the genus Apis, the mason-bees, carpenter-bees, bumblebees, etc. See cuts under Anthophora, car penter - bee, and Hymenoptera.-3. An a emblage of persons who meet to engage in united labor for the benefit of an individual or a family, or in some joint amusement: so called from the combined labor of the bees of a hive: as, a quilting- bee, a husking - bee, a spelling- bee, etc. [U. S.] Now were instituted "quilting bees ," and "husking bees ," and other rural a emblages, where, under the inspiring influence of the fiddle, toil was enlivened by gayety and followed up by the dance. Irving , Knickerbocker, p. 405. To have a bee in one's bonnet, to be a little crackbrained or crazy; be flighty or full of whims or uneasy notions. [Originally Scotch.] Sometimes used specifically: as, to have the presidential bee in one's bonnet , to cherish the hope of becoming President. [U. S.] To have a bee (or bees) in one's head. (a) To be choleric. (b) To be restle or uneasy. B. Jonson. (c) To be somewhat crazy. She's whiles crack-brained and has a bee in her head. IMG:content-1843.png:[graphic] Scott .