96 The Bee People. 
Sometimes she lays as many as three 
thousand in one day. 
She does not keep this up day after day 
the year round; even a queen-bee could 
not be expected to do that. But to lay 
three thousand eggs a day for a short time 
will furnish plenty of work for those 
who have to take care of the eggs and 
the young bees, and will keep the queen 
busy. Sometimes a hundred thousand 
eggs are laid in one season, which means 
a great deal of work for both queen and 
workers. 
The ancients believed that bees gathered 
their young off the leaves of trees, or 
from the flowers of honeywort, the reed, 
or the olive. There was another super- 
stition, that bees came forth from the de- 
cayed bodies of animals, and Virgil, who 
wrote much better Latin than most people 
can write English, soberly gives us a recipe 
for producing bees from the dead bodies 
of cattle! 
