36 PERFECT SOCIETIES OF INSECTS. 
who supply them both with every thing that they want. 
As she increases in dimensions, they keep enlarging the 
cell in which she is detained. "When the business of 
oviposition commences, they take the eggs from the fe- 
male, and deposit them in the nurseries*. Her abdo- 
men now begins gradually to extend, till in process of 
time it is enlarged to 1500 or 2000 times the size of the 
rest of her body, and her bulk equals that of 20,000 or 
30,000 workers. This part, often more than three inches 
in length, is now a vast matrix of eggs, which make long 
circumvolutions through numberless slender serpentine 
vessels :—it is also remarkable for its peristaltic motion, 
(in this resembling the female ant®,) which, like the un- 
dulations of water, produces a perpetual and successive 
rise and fall over the whole surface of the abdomen, and 
occasions a constant extrusion of the eggs, amounting 
sometimes in old females to sixty in a minute, or eighty 
thousand and upwards in twenty-four hours®. As these 
females live two years in their perfect state, how astonish- 
ing must be the number produced in that time! 
This incessant extrusion of eggs must call for the at- 
tention of a large number of the workers in the royal 
chamber (and indeed it is always full of them), to take 
them as they come forth and carry them to the nurseries ; 
in which, when hatched, they are provided with food, 
and receive every necessary attention till they are able 
to shift for themselves.—One remarkable circumstance 
attends these nurseries—they are always covered with a 
*See Vor. f. 4th Ed. 513.» Gould’s Account of English Ants, 22. 
¢ The late John Hunter dissected two young queens. In the ab- 
domen he found two ovaries, consisting of many hundred oviducts, 
each containing mnumerable eges, 
