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 I 



