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come to an end, because the old bees would die out, and there 
would be no young worker bees to replace them. 
The Queen Bee. 
The queen or mother bee is the specialised egg layer. She 
is the state mother whose sole function it is to lay eggs. Her 
other activities are limited as far as possible in order that 
all her energies may be directed to this one end. Her tongue 
is too short to reach the nectary of any flower, so that she 
would starve in a garden of plenty. She has no apparatus 
for collecting or carrying home pollen. The wax glands are 
entirely wanting, so she could not produce the smallest bit of 
comb. But her ovaries are enormously developed, and 
Dzierzon—the greatest of German Beemasters—showed, by 
actual count, that a queen is capable of laying at least three 
thousand eggs in a day. She does not maintain that rate 
throughout the year, her egg-laying being appropriate to 
the season. She can as a rule continue laying for about 
three years, so that a stock provided with a young fertile 
queen may remain in a prosperous condition for that period. 
On the other hand, a stock consisting only of workers would 
become extinct in a few months, ~ 
But the queen will ultimately become exhausted, and will 
fail in the business of laying eggs. So she must be replaced 
by a daughter, rearcd by the workers for this purpose. The 
young «ueen, however, is not perfectly fertile unless mated 
to a drone. This occurs once in her lifetime in the open air 
on a fine day, and this is why hundreds of drones are 
produced by every prosperous stock during the summer 
season. The drone dies in the act of mating and the queen 
returns to the hive. She will not lay any eggs that day, 
nor the next, but will start laying on the second day after 
mating, and will continue to lay eggs, producing either male 
or female offspring, for a period of two or three years. 
The Drone or Male Bee. 
The drone’s activities are even more restricted than those of 
the queen. He has no wax glands; no apparatus for collecting 
