240 NATURAL HISTORY OF WASPS. 
the dangerous journey up the walls of her cell. Her 
duties are very various; each period of her life has 
its special duties, adapted to, and indeed resulting 
from, her physiological condition. The relation in 
which the mother wasp stands to the swarm is pe- 
culiar. She is not to them what the queen-bee is 
said, by some writers, to be to her subjects, she is 
merely a well-developed female wasp, their mother 
rather than their queen. Her history is very like 
that of the workers in its general outline; they 
follow, however imperfectly, in her traces. Like her, 
they build, collect food, and tend the larve ; and like 
her—only under very peculiar circumstances—they 
lay eggs. What we observe in her might be said, 
with little variation, of any of the undistinguishable 
swarin. 
Hunter,* who entered on the study of bees, as he 
did everything else, with the feelings of a physiologist 
in search of the truth, rather than with the com- 
placent wonder which the subject seems generally to 
inspire, has some very happy remarks on the rela- 
tions of bees and wasps respectively to their queens.t 
Speaking of the queen-bee, he says :— 
“She is only a bond of union, for without her 
they seem to have no tie; it is her presence that 
makes them an aggregate animal. May we not 
suppose that the offsprmg of the queen have an 
* “Works. Vol. IV, pp. 429-480. 
+ Mr. Woodbury, of Exeter, whose name is familiar to every prac- 
tical bee-keeper, also favours the view that the queen-bee is rather the 
slave than the mistress of her subjects, her life devoted to laying eggs 
rather than to politics. It is hard to see how it could be otherwise. 
See ‘The Times,’ August 6th, or later, 1864, a letter ‘On Bees and 
Bee-masters.’ 
