so PERFECT SOCIETIES OF INSECTS. 



care of feeding her and her male companion devolves 

 upon the industrious larvae, who supply them both with 

 every thing that they want. As she increases in di- 

 mensions, they keep enlarging the cell in which she is 

 detained. When the business of oviposition commences, 

 they take the eggs from the female, and deposit them 

 in the nurseries ''. Her abdomen now begins gradu- 

 ally 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 re- 

 sembling the female ant""), which, like the undulations 

 of water, produces a perpetual and successive rise and 

 fall over the whole surface of the abdomen, and occa- 

 sions a constant extrusion of the eggs, amounting some- 

 times in old females to sixty in a minute, or eighty thou- 

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

 males live two years in their perfect state, how asto- 

 nishing must be the number produced in that time ! 

 This incessant extrusion of eoo-s must call for the at- 



C>t5 



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 nurse- 

 ries ; in which, when hatched, they are provided with 

 food, and receive every necessary attention till they are 



» See Vol. 1. 2d Ed. 513. '' Gould's Account of English Ants, 22. 



"The late John Hunter dissected two young queens. In the abdomen 

 he found two ovaries, consisting of many hundred oviducts, each contain- 

 ing innutnerubie eggs. 



