Timothy M. Cable, age 11, of Hazelwood, North Carolina, for his question:
How do bees get wax to make their combs?
The worker honeybee performs an endless round of duties. Some are highly skilled operations, such as flying and navigating precisely, tending the young and maintaining the hive. Others involve chemical transformations for making beebread and royal jelly, honey and wax for building combs of storage bins. For these chemical operations she uses special equipment built into her small, furry body. Wax making is extra¬complicated because it is done in several stages.
Fragrant honey is the sweetest of sweet syrups. The comb in which the honeybees store it is made of stiff wax, with no odor and no more flavor than a tallow candle.
One would never suspect that these two substances are made from the same basic ingredients.
But this is so. Both substances are concocted in chemical factories inside the body of the worker honeybee. The series of operations begins when she takes to the air and makes a bee line for a group of flowery blossoms. This is a shopping trip and while she is about it she stocks up with groceries for various purposes.
The curved prongs on her legs form convenient baskets. She stuffs them with grains of golden pollen gathered from the flowers. Later, it will be kneaded with honey to make beebread for the growing larva. While shopping, the busy bee also unrolls her syphon tongue and sucks up sweet, syrupy nectar from the flower throats. With her pollen baskets full and her tummy stuffed with a small drop of nectar, she flies back home. Her sisters help to unpack the pollen, while her stomach adds special chemicals to the nectar. She coughs up this mixture and pours it into a waxen storage cell. As the moisture evaporates, the mixture becomes honey.
When a new comb, or additional waxy cells are needed, several workers disregard their regular daily duties and concentrate on gorging themselves on the honey. Each of these bees has a double row of special glands on the underside of her abdomen. Using a secret chemical recipe, they change the sweet honey into a tasteless, milky¬ white waxy substance. The underside of the bee’s abdomen is sheathed with overlapping scales and the waxy material oozes out between them. It soon dries, forming a double row of stiff scales on the bee’s tummy.
She uses the spikes of her pollen baskets to pry the flakes loose and transfers
How do bees get wax them to her mouth with her front legs. She chews and chews until the wax is a pliable plastic, suitable for modeling. She may use it herself to repair an old cell or mold a new one. But more likely the modeling is done by other workers while she makes more waxy building material.
The comb is a flat structure, stacked with vertical, six sided cells. The cells are all the same shape, though they are made in different sizes for different purposes. Those used for storing pollen or to cradle baby worker bees are about one fifth of an inch wide. The cells for young drones are slightly bigger, and the largest ones are for rearing future queens. Those used to store honey are slightly tilted to avoid spillage.