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Francis L. Hawks
Or, Uncle Philip's Conversations with the Children about Tools and Trades among Inferior Animals
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"Oh, large enough to put my forefinger in, and sometimes fifteen inches long. After she has bored it as deep as is necessary, she begins to divide it into separate cells. So she commences at the bottom, and puts in a quantity of what is called bee-bread, until it reaches about an inch in height; on the top of this she lays an egg, and the bread is put there to feed the young one as soon as it comes out of the egg. She then makes a floor over it out of the dust, as I told you; she knows how to glue this dust together, and she brings it grain by grain from the heap in which she put it when she first brought it out: and she always begins by gluing the dust around the outside of the hole she has bored, and then glues another ring to that, and then another, and another, making each ring smaller and smaller, until she has it all filled; so that her floor, when it is done, appears like a parcel of rings of smaller and smaller sizes placed within each other. On the top of this floor she puts bee-bread, as before, and places another egg on it, and then covers it with a floor again; and so she goes on making cells and filling them with bread, and covering each with a floor, until she has filled up the hole."
"Uncle Philip, how do the young bees get out when the egg is hatched? It seems as if they were shut up for ever in prison."
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