THE GENESIS OF THE QUEEN 103 



the other only to the call of luxury. Or we must 

 go back to mediaeval 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-larvae 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-larvae available. This 

 is generally successful when the young grub has 

 not passed the three days' limit. But, even when 

 all the larvae 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 



