THE LONG NIGHT IN THE HIVE 187 
other creatures of the wilds; and the necessity for 
all that frantic labour throughout the summer days 
be obviated. 
This is by no means so fantastic a notion as it 
appears. Ingenious as is the worker-bee, there is 
one thing that the mere man-scientist of to-day 
could teach her. At present, her system of queen- 
production is to construct a very large cell, four 
or five times as large as that in which the common 
worker is raised. Into this cell, at an early stage 
in its construction, the old queen is induced to 
deposit an egg; or the workers themselves may 
furnish it with an egg previously laid elsewhere; or 
again—as sometimes happens—the large cell may 
be erected over the site of an ordinary worker-cell 
already containing a fertile ovum. This egg in no 
way differs from that producing the common, under- 
sized, sex-atrophied worker-bee; but by dint of 
super-feeding on a specially rich diet, and unlimited 
space wherein to develop, the young grub eventually 
grows into a queen-bee, with all the queen’s extra- 
ordinary attributes. A queen may be, and often 
is, raised by the workers from a grub instead of an 
egg. The grub is enclosed in, or possibly in some 
cases transferred to, the queen-cell; and, providing 
it is not more than three days old, this grub will 
also become a fully developed queen-bee. 
Hibernation, and no Honey 
But, thus far in the history of bee-life, it has been 
impossible for a hive to re-queen itself unless a 
newly-laid egg, or very young larva, has been 
available for the purpose. Hibernation without a 
