Here is completed, with the enumeration of those which successively repose from their toil, the several labours of the community which inhabits the hive.
The structure of the workers, which enables them to carry on all these operations with the requisite facility, is very different from that of the two sexes we have just described. As before said, they are abortive females, but, as I shall have occasion to explain lower down, capable of having this special incapacity removed, if the necessary process requisite to be adopted for the purpose be applied within three days of their being hatched into the larva state. The acquisition of the faculty of fertility entails, however, the loss of all power of pursuing any of the other occupations of the hive practised exclusively by the workers in general. The nurture that gives it them converts them into queens, and moulds them to the structure of this sex described above. As a remarkable and rare exception, some one or other of these workers will occasionally have power of laying a few eggs, but which are always those of drones. The other peculiarities of their structure are its adaptation to the secretion of wax above described; and their power of throwing up the honey they have collected in the first stomach or honey-bag, before it passes on by digestion, somewhat in the way the ruminant quadrupeds bring up the cud, of course by muscular action, without the convulsion of vomiting. Their next distinction is that their mandibles are edentate and more like spoons, and are often so used, or as the plastering-trowel of masons is for smoothing surfaces. Their legs remarkably differ from those of the other sexes, all of their limbs being somewhat adapted to the collection and conveyance of pollen and its manipulation, as well as that of propolis; but it is the posterior shanks which are specially constructed for the conveyance of these materials, by being framed externally like a little basket; being hollowed longitudinally and their lateral edges fringed with recurved hair, which retains whatever may be placed within the smooth and hollow surface, and the apical extreme edge has a pecten or comb of short stiff bristles. The first joint of the posterior feet have also their distinctive form, adapted to special branches of their economy. These are oblong, wider than the shank, and about two-thirds its length, and consequently powerful limbs; at the outer angle of the edge, nearest the shank, is a little projection called the auricle or earlet, the inner surface is clothed with ten parallel transverse rows of close dense hair, and its apical edge has along its whole width a pecten similar to that of the apex of the shank. This shank being without spurs, which only the domestic bee is deficient in, gives the pecten a freedom of action it would not otherwise have, and enables it to be used together with the earlet opposite to it on the foot, as an instrument for laying hold of the thin flakes of wax upon the venter, and to bring them forward to the intermediate legs to be passed on to the mouth, and there to be converted into wax. The pecten of the foot and also its brush aid in their removal in case of need, and help as well both in the manipulation and the storing the materials collected. Thus, this whole structure, exclusively possessed by the worker, is pre-eminently designed for the manifold operations of the hive; and the bee itself and its works are but one closely linked chain of wonderful contrivances.