334 BRITISH BEES. 



each queen successively issues forth upon her bridal 

 morn, to catch her favouring glances, and be the ac- 

 cepted groom. That they are not further conducive to 

 the well-being of the hive is the fault of their structure 

 and of their instinct, which are correlative, they being 

 as little fitted either in their tongue or their legs for the 

 uses of the hive as the queen herself. The physiology 

 of their intercourse is a mystery of mysteries, and would 

 seem to partake of the principle, modified, of that deve- 

 loped in the aphides, where the vital power passes on 

 through successive generations by the efficiency of the 

 energy of one ancestral intercourse. In the hive-bee 

 this is not the case, but in these the one espousal fer- 

 tilizes eggs to the number of often a hundred thousand, 

 yet undeveloped and even indiscernible by the aid of 

 the microscope in the ovaries of the queen, and which 

 become bees progressively in the course of a couple of 

 years, the supposed duration of her existence, during 

 the whole of which time she is laying. The accepted 

 male is destroyed by the effects of the amour, and when 

 all the queens which are to be the heads of independent 

 communities are successively fertilized, and have led 

 forth their colonies, the remaining drones issue compul- 

 sively from the hive and are lost in the wideness of na- 

 ture, and die by the natural limitation of their existence, 

 or become the prey of their numerous enemies. 



The neuters or workers are, as it were, emanations of 

 the queen, or the organs whereby her several functions 

 as a mother are performed, considering the species as 

 restricted to two sexes, and thus they comprise with her, 

 collectively, one organic whole. That this is a consistent 

 view of their condition is further proved by the circum- 

 stance that from their larvae, upon the failure of a queen, 



