16 THE WORKING BEE. 
exercise that authority over the colony in all their avocation, that has 
been attributed to her by many writers. That she is very much es- 
teemed and prized by her subjects I readily admit; but it appears to 
me that they are governed more by the impulse of a natural instinct, 
for each to voluntarily fill and occupy the sphere designed them by 
the Creator, than by the command of the queen; for, unlike man, 
each appears to know their place, and gladly occupy it, and have no 
ambitious spirit to gratify, having no mutineers or revolutionists in 
the colony, but all united, and if you insult or injure one individual, 
you rouse the ire of the whole family. 
CHAPTER V. 
THE WORKING BEL. 
Tur next class for consideration is the worker bee. We have given 
the process of laying and hatching the bees in the preceding pages. 
We now give a description of the working bee. 
These are by some called neuters or mules ; by others female non- 
breeders. The latter is, undoubtedly, the more appropriate title, the 
workers being sterile females with undeveloped ovaries. In a single 
hive the number of these varies from 12,000 to 20,000. If swarming 
is prevented by affording room, a single family, in summer, may con- 
tain 50 or 60,000. They are the smallest members of the community, 
are furnished with a long flexible apparatus known by the name of 
proboscis, have a peculiar structure of the legs and thighs, on the latter 
of which are small hollows or baskets, to receive and carry the pro- 
polis and farina which they collect, and they are armed with a straight 
