ORDER VI.—VEIN-WINGED INSECTS. 263 
single cell, and in three weeks, without having accomplished 
any work, the greater part of them flew away, while the one 
thousand which remained were found dead in the hive the 
next morning. ‘This experiment was repeated several times, 
but always with the same unhappy result. 
From these and such like experiments we are convinced 
that they do not work if their number is not sufficiently 
large, or if they have no queen, and therefore that the ob- 
ject of their labor is to rear and provide for a numerous 
progeny. If in the spring we observe bees returning from 
the meadows and gardens with empty fosse, and if we as- 
certain that no new combs have been made since winter, we 
may be certain that the queen is dead. Every day less and 
less bees return to such a hive, and by the month of June 
scarcely one thousand can be found in the hive. They per- 
ish, or they try to smuggle themselves into another hive, 
where they are generally killed. 
In order to prove that the bees always follow the queen, 
Swammerdam fastened a hair on her foot, and tied it to the 
top of a pole, which he stuck in the ground in his garden. 
The whole swarm immediately followed, and surrounded the 
queen on all sides. In this manner he was able to carry 
the whole swarm any where he pleased. Labet relates that 
he found, in his travels through Western Africa, a man who 
called himself the Lord of the Bees, because they constantly 
followed him, flying about him wherever he went, alighting 
on his cap, face, shoulders, and hands, without stinging him. 
The people thought that he had rubbed himself with some 
plant or substance that prevented their stinging him; but 
the secret of all these manceuvres probably consisted in his 
carrying a queen concealed in his cap or elsewhere. 
It is not their admiration for the queen’s beauty or es- 
teem for her rank that makes the bees follow her and min- 
ister unto her wants, but rather their attachment to the in- 
dividual which produces eggs, and from whom they expect 
