THE QUEEN BEE 97 
and put your ear close to the hive, you will hear a 
shrill piping noise which the ancient skeppists tell 
you is the old queen calling her subjects together 
for the swarm on the morrow. And, sure enough, 
out she goes with half the population of the hive in 
her train, to look for a new home; and in a day 
or so the new queen comes out of her cell to take 
charge of the colony.” 
He paused to fill the old briar pipe again, 
lighting it with slow deliberate puffs, and I could 
not help marking how nearly alike in colour were 
the bowl and his rugged, sunburnt, clever face. 
“But now, look you! ’’ said he, suddenly 
levelling the pipe-stem like a pistol at me to 
emphasise his words. ‘‘If the mother-bee really 
brought all this about, queen would not be a good 
enough name for her. But the truth is, throughout 
all the wonder-workings of the hive, the queen is 
little more than an instrument, a kind of automaton, 
merely doing what the workers compel her to do. 
They are the real queens in the hive, and the mother- 
bee is the one and only subject. .Did you ever 
think what a queen-bee actually is, and how she 
comes to be there at all? The fact is that the 
workers have made her for their own wise purposes, 
just as they make the comb and the honey to store 
in it. The egg she is hatched from is in no way 
different from any worker-egg. If you take one 
from a queen-cell and put it in the ordinary comb, 
it will hatch out a common female worker-bee: and 
an egg transferred from worker-comb to a queen- 
cell becomes a full-grown queen. Thousands and 
thousands of worker-eggs are laid in a hive during 
the season, and each of those could be made into 
G 
