BEE MANUAL. 4] 
The queen is indispensable to the prosperity of the hive. 
She is the only perfectly developed female, and lays all the 
eggs, of which she can, on occasions, produce two to three 
thousand in twenty-four hours. Without her the colony would 
soon dwindle down and die out, or be attacked and killed for 
the sake of its stores, as, after being deprived of their queen, 
the workers generally (unless they are in a position to rear a 
new one, as will be seen further on) lose the disposition to 
defend themselves and their home. The queen is not provided 
with the special organisation which enables the workers to 
gather honey and pollen and to secrete wax. She is furnished 
with a sting, which, however, she very rarely uses, except in 
a struggle with arival queen. When she has been once impreg- 
nated, and has taken her place in a hive, she never leaves it 
except to accompany a swarm. Her term of life may extend 
Fig, 4.--THE QUEEN. 
to four years at least, and during that time she may lay many 
hundreds of thousands of eggs; but she is considered to be in 
her prime in the second year, and is seldom very prolific after 
the third. She can be easily distinguished from the other 
bees, and be recognised even by the most inexperienced from 
the following description :—Her body is not so bulky as that 
of adrone, though longer; it is considerably more tapering 
than that of either drone or worker; her wings are 
much shorter in proportion than those of the other bees; the 
under part of her body is of a lighter and the upper of a 
darker colour than the worker’s; her movements are 
