THE GENESIS OF THE QUEEN 103 
the other only to the call of luxury. Or we must 
go back to medizeval notions, and believe that the 
worker-bees give or withhold some vital principle 
of their own during nurturing operations. Or we 
must give up the problem, and decide that creation 
works on lines very different from those on which 
we have hitherto grounded our faith. 
The difficulty is further complicated by the fact 
that this change of nature does not take place until 
relatively late in the life of the bee. The egg is 
three days in hatching. But the young larva is at 
least three more days old before nature has made 
the irrevocable step along either of the divergent 
ways. For the experiment of transposition can be 
made with exactly the same result if undertaken 
with female bee-larve not more than three days 
old, instead of the unhatched eggs. Indeed, this 
is an operation that the nurse-bees- themselves 
perform, on occasion. If a hive loses its queen, 
and it happens that all the eggs in the worker-cells 
are hatched out, the bees will breed another queen 
from any one of the worker-larve available. This 
is generally successful when the young grub has 
not passed the three days’ limit. But, even when 
all the larve of the hive are older than this, the 
bees will still attempt the task, knowing well that, 
without a queen, the colony must perish. In this 
case, however, the resulting queen will be defective 
in various ways. Probably she will never be 
capable of fertilisation, and therefore the breed of 
