36 PERFECT SOCIETIES OF INSECTS. 



As she increases in dimensions, they keep enlarging the 

 cell in which she is detained. When the business of 

 oviposition commences, they take the eggs from the fe- 

 male, and deposit them in the nurseries^. Her abdo- 

 men now begins gradually to extend, till in process of 

 time it is enlarged to 1500 or 2000 times the size of the 

 rest of her body, and her bulk equals that of 20,000 or 

 30,000 workers. This part, often more than three inches 

 in length, is now a vast matrix of eggs, which make long 

 circumvolutions through numberless slender serpentine 

 vessels : — it is also remarkable for its peristaltic motion, 

 (in this resembling the female ant'',) which, like the un- 

 dulations of water, produces a perpetual and successive 

 rise and fall over the whole surface of the abdomen, and 

 occasions a constant extrusion of the eggs, amounting 

 sometimes in old females to sixty in a minute, or eighty 

 thousand and upwards in twenty-four hours '^. As these 

 females live two years in their perfect state, how astonish- 

 ing must be the number produced in that time ! 



This incessant extrusion of eggs must call for the at- 

 tention of a large number of the workers in the royal 

 chamber (and indeed it is always full of them), to take 

 them as they come forth and carry them to the nurseries; 

 in which, when hatched, they are provided with food, 

 and receive every necessary attention till they are able 

 to shift for themselves. — One remarkable circumstance 

 attends these nurseries — they are always covered with a 

 kind of mould, amongst which arise numerous globules 

 about the size of a small pin's head. This is probably a 



• See Vol. I, 509. " Gould's Account of English Ants, 22. 



' The late John Hunter dissected two young queens. In the ab- 

 domen he found two ovaries, consisting of many hundred oviducts, 

 each containing innumerable eggs. 



