118 TREATISE ON THE 
CHAPTER XVIII. | 
ON THE CONVERSION OF THE LARVA OF 
A WORKER INTO A QUEEN. 
Bees, when deprived of their queen, are 
endowed by nature with the power of reme- 
dying this calamity, by converting a worker 
larva into a royal one, and by means of a 
cell of larger size, and of a peculiar kind 
of nourishment, of producing a female that 
shall be, to all intents and purposes, a queen 
or mother Bee, capable of perpetuating her 
kind. ‘The discovery of this singular fact 
is generally attributed to Schirach, and, pro- 
bably, with justice; for, although the prac- 
tice of making artificial swarms, which can 
only be effected by causing the production 
of artificial queens, the manner in which 
Schirach made the discovery is interesting. 
Having used a great quantity of smoke in 
some of his operations, the Bees were so an- 
noyed by it that numbers of them left the 
