506 INSTINCT OF INSECTS. 



as was before related at large ^, are without delay pulled 

 down, and converted into a variable number of royal cells 

 capacious enough for the education of one or more queen- 

 grubs selected out of the unhoused working grubs — which 

 in this pressing emergency are mercilessly sacrificed — 

 and fed with the appropriate royal food to maturity. 

 Thus sure of once more acquiring a head, the hive return 

 to their ordinary labours, and in about sixteen days one 

 or more queens are produced ; one of which, after being 

 indebted to fortune for an elevation as singular as that of 

 Catherine the First of Russia, steps into day and assumes 

 the reins of state. 



To this remarkable deviation from the usual pro- 

 cedures of the community, the observations above made 

 in the case of the drones must be applied. We cannot 

 account for it by conceiving the working bees to be ac- 

 cjuainted with the end which their operations have in 

 view. If we suppose them to knoiX) that the queen and 

 working-grubs are originally the same, and that to con- 

 vert one of the latter into the former it is only necessary 

 to transfer it to an apartment sufficiently spacious and to 

 feed it with a peculiar food, we confer upon them a dejith 

 of reason to which Prometheus, when he made his clay 

 man, had no pretensions — an original discovery, in short, 

 to which man has but just attained after some thousand 

 years of painful research, having escaped all the observers 

 of bees from Aristomachus, to Swammerdam and Reau- 

 mur of modern times. We have no other alternative, 

 then, but to refer this phenomenon to the extraordinary 



' Sec above, p. l'^7 — • 



