I.] APPENDIX. 53 



female ants are only once fertilized, and are then tended by the 

 workers, being cleaned and fed in the middle of the nest : one 

 often finds them with only three legs, and with their chitinous 

 armour greatly worn. They never leave the centre of the nest, 

 and their only duty is to lay eggs.' 



With regard to the workers, Forel believes that their consti- 

 tution would enable them to live as long as the females (as the 

 experiments of Lubbock also indicate), and the fact that in the 

 wild state they generally die sooner than the females is ' cer- 

 tainly connected with the fact that they are exposed to far 

 greater dangers.' The same relation seems also to obtain 

 among bees, but with them it has not been shown that in con- 

 finement the workers live as long as the queens. 



Bees. According to von Berlepsch ^ the queen may as an 

 exception live for five years, but as a rule survives only two or 

 three years. The workers always seem to live for a much 

 shorter period, generally less than a year. Direct experiments 

 upon isolated or confined bees, or upon marked individuals in 

 the wild state, do not prove this, but the statistics obtained by 

 bee-keepers confirm the above. Every winter the numbers in 

 a hive diminish from 12,000-20,000 to 2000-3000. The queen 

 lays the largest number of eggs in the spring, and the workers 

 which die before the winter are replaced by those which 

 emerge in the summer, autumn or during a mild winter. The 

 queen lays eggs at such a variable rate throughout the year 

 that the above-mentioned inequality in numbers is explained. 

 The workers do not often live for more than six to seven 

 months, and at the time of their greatest labour, (May to July), 

 only three months. An attempt to calculate the length of life 

 of the workers and drones by taking stock at the end of 

 summer, gives six months for the former and four months for 

 the latter ^. 



The drones do not as a rule live so long as four months, for 

 they meet with a violent death before the end of this period. 

 The well-known slaughter of the drones is not, according to the 

 latest observations, brought about directly by means of the 



^ A. von Berlepsch, ' Die Biene und ihre Zucht,' etc., 3rd ed. ; Mann- 

 heim, 1872. 



^ E. Bevan, ' Ueber die Honigbiene und die Lange ihres Lebens ; ' 

 abstract in Oken's ' Isis,' 1844, p. 506. 



