56 A PHILOSOPHER WITH NATURE 



allow me to take her in my hand without attempt- 

 ing to sting. 



As already mentioned, one of my colonies contains 

 an unusually large stock of young queens this year. 

 I have fed the nest liberally during the year with 

 pollen taken from the hive bees, and this may 

 account for the superabundance of royalty. Royalty 

 amongst the bees is not a matter of birth, but of 

 breeding, or to speak more correctly, of feeding. 

 When the hive bees want to manufacture a queen 

 to order they take an egg or young larva, which 

 under ordinary circumstances would develop into 

 a neuter worker, and by special feeding and the 

 necessary enlargement of its cell, it blossoms forth 

 into a fully developed queen. In the bee-hive, indeed, 

 the plebeian worker may at any moment in her 

 youth have greatness thrust upon her, for as in the 

 great Republic, the meanest citizen (if caught 

 young and of the feminine gender) is eligible for 

 the highest honour which the state has to bestow. 



With the humble bees royalty is doubtless manu- 

 factured in a similar way. Any one who has 

 disturbed a nest towards the end of the year may 

 have noticed that the workers are sometimes of 

 various sizes. Those produced at the beginning 

 of the year are often only slightly smaller than the 

 queens, but towards the end of the season I have 

 seen worker bees little bigger than house flies pro- 

 duced in the same nest with those large workers. 

 It has been stated that the difference in size in these 

 cases is due simply to difference in feeding during 

 the larva stage, and if this be true, it means that 

 those small workers produced later in the year are 

 the stunted victims of the process of gorging to 



