EXPERIMENTAL INQUIRIES. 267 
in the drawing,* shows that some unusual in- 
fluences had been at work. Instead of one comb, 
built of cells of uniform size, spreading regularly 
from the centre, there are five patches or tufts of 
cells of all sizes and of the most irregular con- 
struction. Mr. Stone,t who has described a similar 
appearance in the nest of another species, V. vulgaris, 
has suggested an explanation of it in the ill-directed 
efforts of a queenless swarm :—“ The interior pre- 
sented an appearance so unlike the interior of one 
over which a queen presides that I at once felt con- 
vinced no queen had ever set foot init. No order 
or regularity was observed in the disposition of the 
combs; small ones, to the number of seven, were to 
be seen stuck about here and there on the face of 
the original one, from which they depended, while 
the cells were crowded with eggs or small larva, one 
cell containing as many as sixteen eggs, and but few 
less than five or six. The colony... consisted ex- 
clusively of workers, and they rather under than 
over the average size.” 
In Mr. Stone’s specimen the greater part of the 
original nest had been destroyed, and with it the 
queen had perished. In mine the nest was not injured, 
but the queen seems to have been removed by her 
death, or by some accident. In either case it was the 
removal of the queen which lay at the bottom of the 
singular malformation of the comb. The swarm went 
on building irregularly without any fixed plan, till, in 
the absence of any,common bond, they finally 
straggled away. There must have been plenty of 
* Plate XIV. 
+ ‘Zoologist,’ 1860, p. 7263. 
