98 Function of the ^ueen. 



bees. These hermaphrodites are not really hermaphrodites j 

 as so far as I have examined, they have only ovaries or 

 testes, but externally they have drone organs in part, as for 

 instance the appendages of the head and thorax ; and worker 

 organs in part, as the abdomen, will be like that of a drone. 

 Indeed I now have a very strange hermaphrodite, where 

 one side is worker, the other drone. It is very probable 

 that these peculiarities arise from a diseased condition of 

 the queen, or else from diseased spermatozoa. I have 

 known one queen, many of whose bees were thus abnor- 

 mal. 



The function of the queen is simply to lay eggs, and 

 thus keep the colony populous, and this she does with an 

 energy that is fairly startling. A good queen in her best 

 estate will lay two or three thousand eggs a day. I have 

 seen a queen in my observing hive lay for some time at the 

 rate of four eggs per minute, and have proved by actual 

 computation of brood cells that a queen may lay over three 

 thousand eggs in a day. Langstroth and Berlepsch both 

 saw queens lay at the rate of six eggs a minute. The lat- 

 ter had a queen that laid three thousand and twenty-one 

 eggs in twenty-four hours, by actual count, and in twenty 

 days she laid fifty-seven thousand. This queen continued 

 prolific for five years, and must have laid, says the Baron, 

 at a low estimate, more than 1,300,000 eggs. Dzierzon 

 says queens may lay 1,000,000 eggs, and I think these 

 authors have not exaggerated.. As already stated, a queen 

 may lay nearly double her weight of eggs daily. Yet, with 

 even these figures as an advertisement, the queen bee can- 

 not boast of superlative fecundity, as the-queen white-ant 

 — an insect closely related to the bees in habits, though not 

 in structure, as the white-ants are lace-wings and belong to 

 the order Neuroptera, which includes our day-flies, dragon- 

 flies, etc.— is known to lay over 80,000 eggs daily. Yet 

 this poor helpless thing, whose abdomen is the size of a 

 man's thumb and composed almost wholly of eggs, while 

 the rest of her body is not larger than the same in our com- 

 mon ants has no other amusement; she cannot walk; she 

 cannot even feed herself, or care for her eggs. What won- 

 der then that she should attempt big things in the way of 



