98 Function of the Queen. 
bees. These hermaphrodites are not really hermaphrodites ; 
as so far as I have examined, they have only ovaries or 
testes, but externally they have drone organs in part, as for 
instance the appendages of the head and thorax; and worker 
organs in part, as the abdomen, will be like that of a drone. 
Indeed I now have a very strange hermaphrodite, where 
one side is worker, the other drone. It is very probable 
that these peculiarities arise from a diseased condition of 
the queen, or else from diseased spermatozoa. I have 
known one queen, many of whose bees were thus abnor- 
mal. 
The function of the queen is simply to lay eggs, and 
thus keep the colony populous, and this she does with an 
energy that is fairly startling. A good queen in her best 
estate will lay two or three thousand eggs aday. I have 
seen a queen in my observing hive lay for some time at the 
rate of four eggs per minute, and have proved by actual 
computation of brood cells that a queen may lay over three 
thousand eggs inaday. lLangstroth and Berlepsch both 
saw queens lay at the rate of six eggs a minute. The lat- 
ter had a queen that laid three thousand and twenty-one 
eggs in twenty-four hours, by actual count, and in twenty 
days she laid fifty-seven thousand. This queen continued 
prolific for five years, and must have laid, says the Baron, 
at a low estimate, more than 1,300,000 eggs. Dzierzon 
says queens may lay 1,000,000 eggs, and I think these 
authors have not exaggerated. As already stated, a queen 
may lay nearly double her weight of eggsdaily. Yet, with 
even these figures as an advertisement, the queen bee can- 
not boast of superlative fecundity, as the-queen white-ant 
—an insect closely related to the bees in habits, though not 
in structure, as the white-ants are lace-wings and belong to 
the order Neuroptera, which includes our day-flies, dragon- 
flies, etc.—is known to lay over 80,000 eggs daily. Yet 
this poor helpless thing, whose abdomen is the size of a 
man’s thumb and composed almost wholly of eggs, while 
the rest of her body is not larger than the same in our com- 
mon ants has no other amusement; she cannot walk; she 
cannot even feed herself, or care for her eggs. What won- 
der then that she should attempt big things in the way of 
