APICULTURE. 807 



queen to take her place. Sometimes, however, the old, worn-out 

 mother is permitted to remain in the hive while the young one is being 

 rearedj and ultimately dies of neglect and depression, or is assisted to 

 " shuffle off " by her own unfilial progeny. The queen is reared from 

 the same egg as the worker, but in a much larger cell, nearly per- 

 pendicular, and on different food, called " royal jelly," which has the 

 effect of fully developing the sexual apparatus. The time from the 

 egg to the perfect queen emerged from the cell is about sixteen days. 

 In a few days after hatching, the young queen leaves the hive for her 

 " bridal flight," during which, and on the wing, she meets the male 

 bee or drone in copulation and becomes impregnated, when she returns 

 to the hive to remain there until she leads out the first swarm, which 

 she does when she finds young queens being reared in the hive — one 

 of them designed to take her place. A single fertile queen in a colony 

 is the normal condition of the household, and hence the old queen 

 departs to make room for her successor. Second and third swarms 

 are of course led out by the young queens. With the exception of 

 sometimes attacking and destroying inchoate queens, the sole function 

 of the queen is to deposit eggs and lead out the first swarai. After 

 her impregnation she deposits both drone and worker eggs — either 

 kind at pleasure. She is capable, however, as a virgin queen, of lay- 

 ing fertile drone, but not worker, eggs. This apparently anomalous 

 fact {2)ci'rthenogenesis) is now well established, not only in the case of 

 the virgin queen-bee, but in that of several other insects. Sometimes 

 toorker-hees in queenless colonies lay fertile drone-eggs ; but the queen 

 is the only fully developed female in the colony. 



The worker-bees, though " the bone and sinew " of the hive, are 

 not blest with the queen's longevity. In active work, on the wing and 

 off, during the honey-season, they naturally live but a few weeks — 

 from one to two months — while those hatched late in the fall will 

 live until spring, sometimes reaching the age of nine months and 

 upward, which is the maximum longevity of the worker-bee. In pass- 

 ing from the egg to the perfect bee, the worker occupies twenty-one 

 days. The young worker spends several days (from ten to fifteen) at 

 home building comb, attending to the young brood, receiving and 

 depositing the loads of the outside workers, and sundry other little 

 duties, before it ventures to the fields to work. The duties of the older 

 workers of the colony are to gather honey, pollen, and propolis, destroy 

 and cast out the drones when necessary, and defend the colony from 

 enemies without or within. They also, as already noticed, destroy old, 

 unprolific queens and rear young ones to take their places, and some- 

 times lead out in swarming, as the queen does not always take the 

 lead in swarming. And although very young bees are ordinarily very 

 reluctant to leave the hive, I have seen such rush out under the swarm- 

 ing impulse so young that they couldn't fly more than a foot or two, 

 if at all. They usually crawl back home again in apparent disgust 



