21 
Sometimes a queen fails to mate, possibly through the 
scarcity or entire absence of drones. In such cases she 
remains a virgin queen, and, if weather permit, she makes 
frequent flights in search of a drone. At last she seems to 
give up hope, and commences laying without being mated at 
all. The eggs develop in the normal way, but produce only 
drones, whether laid in drone or in worker cells. 
Brood Rearing. 
The egg laid by the queen is quite unlike a fowl’s egg in 
shape. It is elongated, wider at one end than the other, 
slightly curved, and both ends are rounded. It is attached 
by the smaller end to the bottom of the cell, and is just 
large enough to be easily detected by the naked eye. In 
the bottom of the cell it looks like a bit of bluish white 
thread, and is clearly visible to a close observer. Under 
normal circumstances the egg hatches in about three days, 
and the creature that emerges is a tiny white grub 
with no legs, no wings, and no sting. It is fed by the 
worker bees on a kind of thin white jelly, which has an 
acid pungent taste. Its origin is undecided, but there is 
good reason to suppose that this “Royal Jelly” is the 
secretion of two glands situated in the head of the 
worker bee. These glands are not found in the drone, are 
undeveloped in the queen, are shrunken and apparently 
functionless in the old forager bees. But they are large and 
apparently active in the younger worker bees, which are 
known to feed the brood. At a later stage it is said that 
raw honey and pollen are added to the ration of the worker 
bee and the drone, but queens are fed throughout on “ Royal 
Jelly.” Whatever its origin it must be very nourishing, 
because the little grub grows apace, and in six days its weight 
has increased more than a thousand times. 
On the sixth day from the hatching of the egg the 
worker-grub is fully fed, and the bees cover it over with a 
porous cap composed of pollen and wax, so as to allow the 
young bee to breathe. The rest of the development goes 
