3GO PERFECT SOCIETIES OF INSECTS. 



wings rent and torn ; but that in September not one of them is to be 

 seen. 1 Huber does not say whether the wings of the bees in question 

 were lacerated ; but in superannuated insects the hair is often rubbed off 

 the body, which gives them a darker hue than that of more recent indi- 

 viduals of the same species. Should this conjecture turn out true, their 

 banishment and destruction of the seniors of the hive would certainly not 

 show our little creatures in a very amiable point of view. Yet it seems 

 the law of their nature to rid their community of all supernumerary and 

 useless members, as is evident from their destruction of the drones after 

 their work is done. 



It is not often that insects have been weighed ; but Reaumur's curiosity 

 was excited to know, the weight of bees ; and he found that 336 weighed 

 an ounce, and 5376 a pound. According to John Hunter, an ale-house 

 pint contains 2160 workers. 



I have described to you the persons of the different individuals that 

 compose the society of the bee-hive more in detail than I should other- 

 wise have done, in order that you may be the better able to form a judg- 

 ment upon a most extraordinary circumstance in their history, which is 

 supported by evidence that seems almost incontrovertible. The fact to 

 which I allude is this that if the bees are deprived of their queen, and 

 are supplied with comb containing young worker brood only, they will 

 select one or more to be educated as queens ; which, by having a royal 

 cell erected for their habitation, and being fed with royal jelly for not more 

 than two days, when they emerge from the pupa state (though, if they 

 had remained in the cells which they originally inhabited, they would have 

 turned out workers) will come forth complete queens, with their form, 

 instincts, and powers of generation entirely different. In order to produce 

 this effect, the grub must not be more than three days old ; and this is 

 the age at which, according to%chirach (the first apiarist who called the 

 public attention to this miracle of nature), the bees usually elect the larvae 

 to be royally educated ; though it appears from Huber' s observations, that 

 a larva two days or even twenty-four hours old will do. 2 Having chosen 

 a grub, they remove the inhabitants and their food from two of the 

 cells which join that in which it resides; they next take down the 

 partitions which separate these three cells; and, leaving the bottoms 

 untouched, raise round the selected worm a cylindrical tube, which follows 

 the horizontal direction of the other cells : but since at the close of the 

 third day of its life its habitation must assume a different form and direc- 

 tion, they gnaw away the cells below it, and sacrifice without pity the 

 grubs they contain, using the wax of which they were formed to construct 

 a new pyramidal tube, which they join at right angles to the horizontal 

 one, the diameter of the former diminishing insensibly from its base to its 

 mouth. During the two days which the grub inhabits this cell, like the 

 common royal cells now become vertical 3 , a bee may always be observed 

 with its head plunged into it ; and when one quits it another takes its 

 place. These bees keep lengthening the cell as the worm grows older, 

 and duly supply it with food, which they place before its mouth, and 



i Thorley On Bees, 179. 2 Huber, i. 137. 



3 Reaumur, who was, however, unacquainted with this extraordinary fact, has 

 figured one of these cells, v. t. 82. f. 3. h. 



