ECOLOGY 285 



drone eggs, she is carried out and killed, and a new queen is raised. If she 

 lays eggs in small wax cells, and she is young, she lays fertilized female 

 eggs; if the cell is a large one,- she lays unfertilized drone eggs. It seems to be 

 simply a matter of the size of the cell. When the bees are moved to swarm 

 out and leav^e the hive to start a new colony, the queen goes along with 

 them. If she doesn't go, a guard of workers goes in and gets her. Two sum- 

 mers ago a swarm came out of one of my hives. I caught the queen with 

 difficulty and awkwardness, put her in a cage after much fingering, and 

 gave her and her flock a new hive. Next morning I found her lying dead 

 in front of the hive, with a few bees crawling over her. Authorities tell me 

 I handled her too much; she got a strange smell and the workers killed her. 



When a hive is opened on a rainy day and rain falls into the hive, the 

 workers are hkely to kill the queen. These are reactions for which it is not 

 easy to see an explanation. Once a colony was left queenless by such mad- 

 ness and without hope of ever getting a queen. Left to themselves they 

 would have died out. But they were given the makings of a new queen, 

 which they accepted, and raised a queen and produced 15 pounds of good 

 honey. 



Queens and workers come from exactly the same kind of eggs. Queens 

 are raised in very large cells, as big as the end of one's little finger, and are 

 fed as larvae upon very rich food called royal jelly. If one takes a young 

 worker out of her cell and places her in a big cell with a bit of royal jelly, 

 the bees will go and make a queen of her. Or, if the queen is removed, the 

 bees will make several queens from the recently laid eggs. When, in 16 

 days, those new queens are hatching there are exciting times. 



A queen emerges pom her cell with a number of complete behavior pat- 

 terns. One day a worker came by just as a queen emerged. She jumped on 

 the worker and was about to give the death blow with her powerful sting 

 when she suddenly stopped and got off. My informant remarked that "she 

 discovered her mistake." Did she? Soon she met a newly hatched queen. 

 Again she leaped on and this time she plunged her sting into the abdomen 

 of her victim between the plates of armor, and the victim curled up and 

 died. 



After killing all her immediate rivals, the young queen lives quietly for 

 a day or so, and then goes out on her mating flight. A few workers go with 

 her. They fly up into the air and are gone a few hours in the middle of the 

 day. She meets the drone in flight and receives into a little sac enough sperm 

 cells to supply her egg-laying for two, three, four or even five years — 200,- 

 000 to 1,000,000 male sperms. She returns to the hive with a high degree 

 of certainty. Whether she finds her own way back or is guided by her more 

 experienced attendants we can not say. Having returned, she is groomed 

 by her maids, and in two or three days more begins her career of egg- 

 laying. On occasion a vigorous young queen caji lay 2,500 eggs a day, jnore 

 than twice her own weight! 



