Each male willow catkin is composed of a large number of small flowers. It is not difficult to see that the stamens of the catkin are always arranged in pairs, and that each individual flower is nothing but one such pair standing on a green, black tipped little scale. By scrutinizing the flowers, one can also notice that the scale bears one or two tiny warts. Those are the nectaries or honey glands (Fig. 26, page 74). The staminate willow catkins, then, provide their visitors with both nectar and pollen; a marvelous arrangement, for it provides exactly what the bee queens need to make their beebread, a combination of honey and pollen with which the young of all species are fed. The only exception to this is certain bees that have become parasites. I will deal with these later on.

Quite often, honeybees form a majority on the willow catkins. As we have already seen in the first chapter, bumblebees are bigger, hairier, and much more colorful than honeybees, exhibiting various combinations of black, yellow, white and orange. Let us not try to key them out at this stage of the game, and let us just call them Bombus; there must be several dozen species in the United States alone. If you really insist on knowing their names, an excellent book on the North American species is Bumblebees and Their Ways by O. E. Plath.

If we manage to keep track of a Bombus queen after she has left her feeding place, we may discover the snug little hideout which she has fixed up for herself when she woke up from her winter sleep. As befits a queen, a bumblebee female is rather choosy and may spend considerable time searching for a suitable nesting place. Most species seem to prefer a ready-made hollow such as a deserted mouse nest, a bird house, or the hole made by a woodpecker; some show a definite liking for making their nest in moss. Once she has made up her mind, the queen starts out by constructing, in her chosen abode, a small ``floor'' of dried grass or some woolly material. On this, she builds an ``egg compartment'' or ``egg cell'' which is filled with that famous pollen and nectar mixture called beebread. She also builds one or two waxen cups which she fills with honey. Then, a group of eggs is deposited in a cavity in the beebread loaf and the egg compartment is closed. The queen afterward keeps incubating and guarding her eggs like a mother hen, taking a sip from time to time from the rather liquid honey in her honey pots. When the larvae hatch, they feed on the beebread, although they also receive extra honey meals from their mother. She continues to add to the pollen supply as needed.