10 Chapter I. 



is based on an organic, i. e., vegetative fact, namely 

 on the common descent from one and the same parent, 

 called a "queen." 



Honey-bees have never more than one queen in the 

 hive, ants may have several of them. The instinctive 

 dependence of bees on their queen is not so great as 

 was formerly believed. Moreover, in the bee-hive the 

 queen has essentially no other function than that of 

 laying eggs; for the rest, her attitude towards the 

 social activities of the colony is entirely passive ; even 

 when the bees are swarming the old "sovereign" is 

 generally hurried along by the crowd of her "faithful 

 subjects;" she does not lead the expedition, neither 

 does she determine its direction. 1 However, a swarm 

 of bees deprived of their queen will disperse, because 

 they have no common center of attraction, no point 

 of crystallization, so to say, around which to form a 

 new colony. In bee-hives the instinctive bond uniting 

 queen and workers is closer than among ants, because 

 the odor emitted by the queen exercises a far more 

 powerful attraction 2 on the workers than in the case 



*) Abbe J. J. Kieffer communicated the following observations: 

 "An old queen must often be actually forced out of the hive by the bees 

 already swarming; sometimes the bees are gone, the queen being left 

 behind in the hive. In other cases I observed that the old queen had 

 dropped to the ground; in spite of this, the bees settled at quite a 

 different place on some tree, and suffered themselves to be put in a 

 new hive which, however, they soon left again, because the queen was 

 missing." 



2 ) How powerful is this attraction, can be gathered from an obser- 

 vation made by Fr. Spillmann, S. J., in June, 1896. On catching a 

 cluster of swarming bees, a few hundred workers had remained in the 

 catching apparatus and could not find their way to the new hive. Led 

 by their sense of smell, however, they clustered around a queen that 

 had been lying dead on the ground for eight days, although it belonged 

 to a different hive. 



