222 THE BEE NATION. 



cells. He tore down two and left only the third. The 

 following morning he saw, to his astonishment, that the 

 bees, which now had their queen again and required no 

 other, had carried away all the food from the royal cell 

 clearly to prevent the larva therein contained from develop- 

 ing into a queen ! 



In the same way bees which have a queen but which are 

 given larvse with royal food to take care of, pull them out 

 of their cells and greedily eat up the food. But if they are 

 without a queen, they change the cells into royal ones and 

 nurse the larvce into queens. The time which may elapse in 

 such cases before the emergence of the queen-pupse extends, 

 or may extend, to fourteen clays or more, and the bees, as 

 has been said, remain perfectly quiet and depressed during 

 this time, awaiting the coming event. The life of the hive 

 here depends entirely on an idea, or on the picture in the 

 brain of the little creatures of a future event that is outside 

 the ordinary rule, and it is comprehensible neither by " in- 

 stinct " nor by " inheritance," but only by a mental process. 



Better and quicker than even the bees themselves, can men r 

 as the bee-masters, come to the help of a chieftainless hive by 

 introducing a new and full-grown queen. But this proceed- 

 ing is attended with special difficulties, for the bees of a hive 

 only suffer their own members in it, aud chase away or kill 

 bees of another colony, distinguishing them apparently by 

 smell. The same fate would befall a strange queen, who is 

 received on her arrival with an angry humming, were it not 

 that man's ingenuity has invented the so-called queen-house. 

 It is a little cage, woven out of fine wire- trellis, in which 

 the queen is enclosed and introduced into a queenless hive. 

 The trellis prevents the bees from killing the new comer at 

 once, and gives them time to recognise her as a new queen > 

 and to acknowledge or accustom themselves to her. 



Such fin event is admirably described by Major D. Schal- 

 lich, of Ludwigsburg, in a letter kindly sent to the author, 

 Nov. 17, 1875 : 



" The minister of Laudenbach, in Verbach-Thal, is one of 

 the most distinguished bee-masters in Wurtemburg. I saw at 

 his place how he took the honey from the comb, and how the 

 bees were not simple enough to build new cells, but without 

 further trouble carried the honey into the cells built by 

 their predecessors. If it were a question of instinct, they 



