26 BEES AND BEE-KEEPING. 



circle of dutiful subjects, reverently watching her 

 movements, and liable to instant banishment upon 

 any neglect of duty; these it was once the fashion 

 to compare to the twelve Apostles, and, to make 

 the ridiculous suggestion complete, their number 

 was said to be invariably twelve. If all this were 

 true, beginners in bee-keeping would not find the 

 difficulty in discovering a queen which they some- 

 times experience. But to resume. The egg contains a 

 germ, which, kept warm by the native heat of the 

 colony, and fed by abundance of yolk, will develop 

 into a grub, which, in some instances, frees itself from 

 the egg case by struggling into the first quantities of 

 food put into its cell by the nurse bees, the very 

 condition in which we just now made its acquaint- 

 ance. 



We have already learnt that the worker bees are 

 female, but they are sexually aborted, and normally in- 

 capable of laying eggs. The queen, or mother, on the 

 contrary, is fully developed, and her capacity for egg- 

 production is immense, a good queen being able to 

 furnish to the cells an average of two eggs per minute 

 for weeks in succession. A new question now arises, 

 Whence the queen ? and we are brought face to face 

 with a difficulty which even yet we may not have fully 

 surmounted, although, in a later chapter, I hope to 

 give a relatively more satisfactory answer than has 

 yet been attempted. The queen, in short, is pro- 

 duced from an egg in all respects identical with the 

 eggs which furnish the workers. The difference is 

 brought about by a change of treatment to the grub 

 on the part of the nurses. When a queen is to be 



