PERFECT SOCIETIES OF INSECTS. 143 
has lost the old queen), soon after this event goes to visit 
the royal cells that are still inhabited. She darts with 
fury upon the first with which she meets; by means of 
her jaws she gnaws a hole large enough to introduce the 
end of her abdomen, and with her sting, before the in- 
cluded female is in a condition to defend herself or re- 
sist her attack, she gives her a mortal wound. The 
workers, who remain passive spectators of this assassina- 
tion, after she quits the victim of her jealousy, enlarge the 
breach that she has made, and drag forth the carcase of a 
queen just emerged from the thin membrane that envelops 
the pupa. If the object of her attack be still in the pupa 
state, she is stimulated by a less violent degree of rage, 
and contents herself with making a breach in the cell: 
when this happens, the death of the inclosed insect is 
equally certain, for the workers enlarge the breach, pull 
it out, and it perishes?. If it happens, as it sometimes 
does, that two queens are disclosed at the same time, the 
care of Providence to prevent the hive from being wholly 
despoiled of a governor is singularly manifested by a re- 
markable trait in their instinct, which, when mutual de- 
struction seems inevitable, makes them separate from 
each other as if panic-struck. ‘Two young queens,” 
says M. Huber, “left their cells one day, almost at the 
same moment;—as soon as they came within sight, they 
darted upon each other, as if inflamed by the most un- 
governable anger, and placed themselves in such an at- 
titude, that the antenne of each were held by the jaws of 
its antagonist; head was opposed to head, trunk to trunk, 
abdomen to abdomen; and they had only to bend the ex- 
a Huber, 1. 171— 
