THE SOVEREIGN WORKER-BEE 145 
deposits only one egg in each cell; but these eggs 
in the queenless hive have been laid in a curiously 
haphazard way. The eggs are straggled over the 
comb. Two or three cells have been furnished at 
one spot and a few more at another, without the 
slightest attempt at the usual order and system. 
Moreover, some cells contain single eggs, but 
others two, or even three, apiece. It looks as if 
some demented mother-bee from another hive had 
caught her keepers napping, and had made sur- 
reptitious excursion into the queenless stock. But 
the most careful search through the hive will reveal 
no queen, nor is one to be found. The explanation 
of the vagary is that one of the workers has, in 
some extraordinary way, succeeded in rousing her 
atrophied nature, and has become capable of laying 
eggs. Yet the doom of the colony is not delayed 
by this, but rather hastened; for these eggs will 
produce only drones, and thus still more useless 
mouths to feed. In one well-authenticated case, 
the bees of a queenless colony built a queen-cell, 
and actually transplanted to it one of these eggs 
laid by a fertile worker, a dead drone being after- 
wards found in the cell. 
How the laying worker is produced under the 
spur of the national crisis can only be a matter 
for speculation, but probably the youngest bee 
of the colony is plied with the special food usually 
given to queens, and thus her generative faculties 
are, to a certain extent, developed. 
1Q 
