1900-1901.] A Field Naturalists Holiday. 139 
were shown in the cases of the Central Apicultural Society. 
The members know that there are three kinds of cells in a 
hive: small hexagonal cells—the workers’ cells; larger hex- 
agonal cells—the drone cells; and a few very large cells, not 
unlike strawberries that have been hollowed out by snails,— 
these last are the queen cells. Now in a hive, although the 
social organisation is so highly developed, the work goes on 
with the routine of the War Office. The queen lays eggs at 
the rate of many hundreds a day: if she lays an egg in a 
small cell, the other bees give it a worker’s fare, and it grows 
up into an undeveloped female, or worker—shall we say the 
new woman of bee society? When she lays an egg in one of 
the large strawberry cells, the nurserymaids of the hive feed 
it with much richer food, and it grows into a queen. Now 
every bee-keeper knows that the more queen cells there are in 
a hive the more queens will be produced; so he removes the 
queen cells—all but one, just as he removes the drone cells 
except a few. Two Americans went on another tack to attain 
their object—good queens. They had 600 hives, and they 
noticed that one hive particularly worked extremely well, 
while the rest did moderately well or badly. They made 
artificial queen cells, little hanging capsules attached to laths. 
The queen soon did her routine duty, laid a fertile egg in one 
of the cells, and the workers did theirs. When it had hatched 
into a larva, they put in some royal jelly beside it. The bee- 
keepers transferred the capsule into the hives needing improve- 
ment—the workers there did the rest: they fed the young 
larva with more royal food, and in due time the hive had a 
new queen of the most desirable kind. In this way in a very 
short time they had all their 600 hives supplied. This is a 
wholesale way of improving animal societies. 
We continue our walk, and have time for only one more 
visit. We go now to the Rue des Nations, and look into one 
_ of the houses there, of great interest to the field naturalist. 
It is the villa of the Prince of Monaco. It contains samples 
of all kinds of apparatus used by the Prince in his ocean 
explorations—dredges, and traps of all kinds, some very in- 
genious, which the Prince used in his explorations in the 
“Hirondelle” and the “Princess Alice” I. and II. Here 
Was an unrivalled collection for an amateur to make. There 
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