512 INSTINCT OF INSECTS. 
as was before related at large*, are without delay pulled 
down, and converted into a variable number of royal cells 
capacious enough for the education of one or more queen- 
grubs selected out of the unhoused working grubs—which 
in this pressing emergency are mercilessly sacrificed— 
and fed with the appropriate royal food to maturity. 
Thus sure of once more acquiring a head, the hive return 
to their ordinary labours, and in about sixteen days one 
or more queens are produced; one of which, after being 
indebted to fortune for an elevation as singular as that of 
Catherine the First of Russia, steps into day and assumes 
the reins of state. 
To this remarkable deviation from the usual pro- 
cedures of the community, the observations above made 
in the case of the drones must be applied. We cannot 
account for it by conceiving the working bees to be ac- 
quainted with the end which their operations have in 
view. If we suppose them to know that the queen and 
working-grubs are originally the same, and that to con- 
vert one of the latter into the former it is only necessary 
to transfer it to an apartment sufficiently spacious and to 
feed it with a peculiar food, we confer upon them a depth 
of reason to which Prometheus, when he made his clay 
man, had no pretensions—an original discovery, in short, 
to which man has but just attained after some thousand 
years of painful research, having escaped all the observers 
of bees from Aristomachus to Swammerdam and Reau- 
mur of modern times. We have no other alternative, 
then, but to refer this phenomenon to the extraordinary 
4 See above, p. 130—. 
