20 
The Laying of the Queen. 
The most noticeable thing about the queen is the great 
development of the abdomen, which projects beyond the 
wings. It accommodates the huge ovaries, which, in the 
laying season, are extremely active, producing in one day 
more than twice the weight of the queen in eggs. The legs 
of the queen are highly developed, because she spends her 
life in walking. The first man to describe the laying of the 
queen was a Scotch clergyman, the Rev. William. Dunbar, 
Minister of Applegarth, who, in 1840, wrote a beautiful book 
on the bee, and was so modest that he did not put his name 
on the title page. When Langstroth, the father of American 
bee-keeping, published his book in 1851, he was content to 
quote, with acknowledgment, the Scotch parson’s description 
of the laying of the queen. During the laying season she 
walks over the surface of the comb, examining cell after 
cell until she finds one empty, freshly varnished, and 
situated well within the warm part of the hive. She bends 
her body sharply, inserts her abdomen into the cell, turns 
round until she is looking downwards and deposits an egg 
in the cell. At this period she is waited upon by a number 
of workers, who keep their heads towards the queen at all 
times and supply her with anything that she requires. It 
is their duty to see that she does not waste her time looking 
for food, or in making her toilet. They perform all offices 
for the queen, and thus enable her to set her whole mind to 
the business of laying eggs. 
The queen bee requires mating only once in her life, 
because she has a little reservoir or sperm sac in which she 
can store the sperm received from the drone at her mating. 
The sperm cells remain alive and ready to become active for 
years. Very old queens, however, begin to produce what 
might be called accidental or inadvertent drones — drones 
produced in worker cells—and it has been suggested that the 
sperm has become exhausted, but it is more likely that the 
queen has lost the power of working the mechanism of 
fertilisation. 
