KING AND QUEEN. 43 



the upper nurseries ; which, in the largest hills, would 

 be four or five feet in the straightest line, and much 

 more if carried through all the winding passages 

 which lead through the inner chambers and apart- 

 ments. 



The king and queen, after once they are immured 

 in their solitary cell, never quit it. The queen, like 

 the queen bee, is the mother of the whole com- 

 munity. In this confinement she undergoes a con- 

 siderable change ; not so much by an alteration of 

 form, as by an increase of size in a particular part. 

 The abdomen, or lower body, stretches out like a bag, 

 enlarging to a vast bulk, compared with the size of 

 the labom'ers. Smeathman says he has seen this sack 

 above five inches long. These queens are the parents 

 of multitudes of eggs. Some of them have been ob- 

 served to lay sixty in a minute, which, if uninter- 

 rupted, would amount to eighty thousand in one day 

 of twenty-four hours. Instinct directs the labourers 

 to watch the queen, in order to take away the eggs 

 as soon as they are deposited, and to carry them to 

 the distant cells, where they are hatched, and attend- 

 ed afterwards by these labourers, with the same care 

 as most other creatures bestow upon their own pro- 

 geny. 



It is another peculiar instinct of all the different 

 species, that the working and fighting insects never 



