262 BEE QUEEN-MAKING. 



changed and brilliant destiny is in store. Save for the un- 

 looked-for accident, which has left the throne without an 

 occupant, this low-born Bee, straitly housed and poorly fed, 

 would have left her cell in size and form and colour, like the 

 rest of its working sisterhood, and, like them, would have led 

 a life of labour : but now, her body will be expanded, her 

 organs developed, her colours brightened, her wings and in- 

 stinctive virtues alone being curtailed. 



The first process of her manufacture is begun already by the 

 destruction going on around her. Her narrow lodging, by the 

 sacrifice of those adjacent, is converted into a spacious chamber 

 allowing full scope for her bodily expansion ; and soon will nu- 

 merous nurses be busy, cramming her with that nutritious stim- 

 ulating substance Ccilled " royal jelly." Then in due season, 

 in ten days or thereabouts, out will come an artificial sovereign, 

 in all respects as good as ever issued from a royal egg. 

 , The above curious process of conversion, though supposed 

 to have been known to the ancients, was first published by 

 Schirach (a French naturalist) in his history of " La Eeine des 

 Abeilles." Although the fact was ascertained by careful ex- 

 periment, its assertors were for a long time laughed at, and 

 even abused, in one case, by an opponent who, though he saw 

 nothing incredible in the conversion of plants into animals, 

 deemed it the height of absurdity that the nature of an animal' 

 should admit of change.* 



* Needham, Insect Manufacture, p. 313. 



