378 INTRODUCTION TO ZOOLOGY CHAP. 



As soon as the first queen has left the hive, 

 tne ^ esfc " princess " is allowed to emerge, the 

 workers helping her to bite away the end of her 

 cell, and tending her carefully, for she is weak and pale just 

 at first. In a very few minutes, however, she gets stronger, 

 and seems to become sensible of the presence of other young 

 queens in the royal cells around, and to have an instinctive 

 jealousy of them, for, if not stopped, she will now throw her- 

 self upon one such cell, and, tearing it open, sting the inmate 

 to death, passing on to each in turn, until she herself is 

 left queen without rival. If, however, the colony is a very 

 numerous one, the workers will not allow her to touch the 

 royal cells, in which case she will soon leave the hive and 

 go off with a second swarm of workers and drones to form 

 a second new colony ; even a third swarm sometimes can be 

 spared. 



Occasionally, though not often, two young queens emerge 

 at the same time, and they then fight for supremacy, whilst 

 the workers surround the two combatants in a ring. They 

 seize each other with their jaws and feet, and hold on until 

 one manages to insert her sting in a soft part of her 

 opponent's body, causing immediate death. The sting is 

 then carefully withdrawn so that the victor is uninjured. 

 When the last swarm has been given off, the next queen 

 that emerges is always allowed to kill any others that may 

 still be waiting in the royal cells. 



The The new young queens, before they can start on 



Marriage their special work for the hive, must go for the 

 Flight, marriage flight with the drones, and this strange 

 event must next be described. Within a few days of 

 the founding of the new colony, or the birth of the last new 

 queen in the old colony, the young queen, one sunny, still 

 morning, will come to the door of the hive, and hesitatingly 

 issue forth ; then after a little hovering around, as if to fix 

 in her mind the position of her home which she has never 

 before seen from without, she suddenly soars off all alone, 

 rising ever higher and higher towards the sky. Now she is 

 seen by the drones, who are out from all the hives around, 

 and they dart after her. Maeterlinck, in his Life of the Bee, 

 describes, in words which none can equal, how they pursue 

 her, but one after the other falls back exhausted in the chase, 



