Social Insects. 9 



ceeded, repeating the jubilant note. If only a comb of larvae 

 be given them, they still recognize it as a deliverance from the 

 threatened extinction of the colony. In a few hours one of the 

 cells over a larva two or three days old will be enlarged by the 

 partial destruction of the walls of the adjoining cells. This en- 

 larged cell is built outward and downward, and the larva is fed 

 on the so-called royal jelly or bee-milk. The supply of this 

 food is always lalentiful, and when a well-developed queen has 

 issued, it is not uncommon to find a quantity of the food, in a 

 partially dried, jelly-like mass, in the bottom of the cell. 

 When, preparatory to swarming, young queens are being reared, 

 the workers have to guard them, even in the cell, from the jeal- 

 ous fury of the reigning queen, and the instinctive rivalry and 

 conflict between queens, accompanied by a peculiar shrill battle- 

 cry, first noticed by the elder Huber, are quite suggestive of simi- 

 lar conflicts between rival queens in human monarchies. 



Economy of Hive. Social Organization. Division of Labor. 



Each bee, as already stated, labors for the good of the com- 

 monwealth of which it is a member. Of them it might well be 

 said: 



"Salus rei publiae suprema lex." 



It is the welfare of the colony which directs the actions of all, 

 and not the will of the queen. Indeed, it would seem that the 

 latter performed- her important function — that of supplying the 

 hive with eggs — only when the workers willed it, their own con- 

 dition of prosperity as regards stores, or their anticipations of 

 the future needs of the colony as regards population, causing 

 them to supply the queen liberally with food rich in nitrogen — a 

 partially digested substance or a gland product, or perhaps a 

 mixture of both, which she alone cannot produce, yet without 

 which any considerable production of eggs is an impossibility. 



As Evans remarks : 



"The prescient female rears her tender brood 

 In strict proportion to the hoarded food." 



We must, then, credit the industrious and provident workers 

 with the chief influence in shaping the policy of the hive. They 

 are the servum pecus — the living force — of the colony. And to 

 the end that order and efficiency of effort may prevail, they have, 

 we find, a marked division of labor. In the normal condition of 



