136 DISAPPEARANCE OF EGGS IN THE CELLS. 



the eggs disappear sometimes from the cells in rather an 

 extraordinary manner ; but we have generally found that 

 those eggs are abortive ones, which the bees, on finding them 

 to be useless, proceed to remove immediately from the cell, 

 in order to make room for others, which the queen may 

 have to lay. Huber, however, totally denies the removal of 

 the egg from cell to cell, and he accounts for their disap- 

 pearance in a manner truly Huberian and original ; for he 

 affirms that, with the true spirit of the gourmand, they pro- 

 ceed to eat them ! ! in which act, however, he confesses that 

 he never entrapped them ; but not knowing exactly how to 

 account for the disappearance of the eggs, and scorning to 

 be guided or to profit by the experience of others, he con- 

 jectured that he could not hit upon a more expeditious or 

 a more easy method of accounting for it, than to make the 

 bees eat them. Now, without entering into any discussion 

 of the unnatural and improbable hypothesis of the bees eat- 

 ing the eggs, we are able to affirm that the bees do actually 

 remove the eggs ; and this was confirmed by two experiments, 

 in the first of which we discovered that the queen, contrary 

 to her usual habit, had deposited more than one egg in a 

 cell ; and this is by no means a case of uncommon occurrence 

 in the vigour of the breeding season, when the queen, from 

 the extreme rapidity with which the eggs emerge from her 

 ovarium, is scarcely able to pass from cell to cell without 

 dropping one of her eggs, and in some cases, the eggs will 

 be actually found upon the platform of the hive, when the 

 bees will proceed immediately to lodge them in a vacant cell. 

 It is well known that the bees will drag out an abortive 

 nymph from the cell, and carry it out of the hive ; but the 

 mere disappearance of this nymph would not entitle any 

 one to draw the conclusion that the bees had made a meal 

 of it. It, however, frequently happens, that there is not a 

 vacant cell in which the queen can deposit her eggs ; and in 

 that case, she will lay sometimes two and sometimes three 



