48 AUSTRALIAN BEE LOKE AND BEE CULTURE- 



mother ! The only maternal trait she possesses is that of egg- 

 laying. 



In two or three days after she returns to the hive the act of 

 laying commences. So eager is she in this duty that I have 

 frequently seen her depositing an egg in cell after cell without 

 even taking the trouble to note if she had not made a mistake now 

 and then — I mean a mistake in not leaving a cell empty. During 

 the earlier months of her laying she uses the workers' cells for 

 worker eggs only. Later on she will lay in both sized cells — drone 

 and workers. Then I have known her make mistakes by dropping, 

 a drone egg — that is, an egg that will produce a drone — in a 

 worker's cell ; and, as far as I know, neither queen or workers 

 discover the mistake till it is too late, when they rectify it, as 

 far as they can, by elongating the worker cell so as to make up to 

 the little inmate what is lacking in width. Here her motherly 

 instinct ends. All other domestic duties are delegated to the 

 worker. Theirs it is to attend to the egg when hatching, and to 

 the developing I'arvge. What a. wonderful division of maternal 

 duties ! The queen, with the power of being a mother without 

 the power of being able to' administer to the wants of her off- 

 spring. The worker, with power to attend to, care for, and 

 nourish, even to the supplying of the earliest necessary food — bee 

 milk — but not the power of being a mother — that is, not the 

 power of reproducing her species. 



Having taken a cursory glance of the mother bee — not from 

 the cradle to the grave, but from maturity to the first stage in 

 m.aternity ; not from a scientific or a practical standpoint — but 

 with a view to interest those outside the practical and scientific 

 sphere of bee-life, I will now retrace the steps, and go back to the 

 beginning — the egg that hatches out a queen. But is the egg the 

 beginning ? Which was first — the egg or the bee ? The queen 

 laid the egg and the egg produced the queen ; that is a never- 

 ending cycle — writing around and around a ring. 



We know that frequently after returning from her marital 

 flight she begins laying after two or three days' rest. Before she 

 took that flight her ovum was surcharged with ovules ; these ovules 

 are germs of matter — (a philosopher once said matter was never 

 mind, and mind was no matter); — but her spermatheca was 

 empty. The spermatheca is an internal sac to receive and to 

 retain the life-germs. The object of the flight I have referred to 

 was to get this empty sac charged with these life-germs. You will 

 remember I said the egg was not fecundated, but the queen. 



