360 PERFECT SOCIETIES OF INSECTS. 
wings rent and torn; but that in September not one of them is to be 
seen.! Huber does not say whether the wings of the bees in question 
were lacerated ; but in superannuated insects the hair is often rubbed off 
the body, which gives them a darker hue than that of more recent indi- 
viduals of the same species. Should this conjecture turn out true, their 
banishment and destruction of the seniors of the hive would certainly not 
show our little creatures in a very amiable point of view. Yet it seems 
the law of their nature to rid their community of all supernumerary and 
useless members, as is evident from their destruction of the drones after 
their work is done. 
It is not often that insects have been weighed; but Reaumur’s curiosity 
was excited to know the weight of bees; and he found that 336 weighed 
* an ounce, and 5376 a pound, According to John Hunter, an ale-house 
pint contains 2160 workers. 
Thave described to you the persons of the different individuals that 
compose the society of the bee-hive more in detail than I should other- 
wise have done, in order that you may be the better able to form a judg- 
ment upon a most extraordinary circumstance in their history, which is 
supported by evidence that seems almost incontrovertible. The fact to 
which i allude is this— that if the bees are deprived of their queen, and 
are supplied with comb containing young worker brood only, they will 
select one or more to be educated as queens ; which, by having a royal 
cell erected for their habitation, and being fed with royal jelly for not more 
than two days, when they emerge from the pupa state (though, if they 
had remained in the cells which they originally inhabited, they would have 
turned out workers) will come forth complete queens, with their form, 
instincts, and powers of generation entirely different. In order to produce 
this effect, the grub must not’ be more shin three days old ; and this is 
the age at which, according to Schirach (the first apiarist who called the 
public attention to this miracle of nature), the bees usually elect the larve 
to be royally educated ; though it appears from Huber’s observations, that 
a larva two days or even twenty-four hours old will do. Having chosen 
a grub, they remove the inhabitants and their food from two of the 
cells which join that in which it resides; they next take down the 
partitions which separate these three cells; and, leaving the bottoms 
untouched, raise round the selected worm a cylindrical tube, which follows 
the horizontal direction of the other cells: but since at the close of the 
third day of its life its habitation must assume a different form and direc- 
tion, they gnaw away the cells below it, and sacrifice without pity the 
grubs they contain, using the wax of which they were formed to construct 
a new pyramidal tube, which they join at right angles to the horizontal 
one, the diameter of the former diminishing insensibly from its base to its 
mouth. During the two days which the grub inhabits this cell, like the 
common royal cells now become vertical *, a bee may always be observed 
with its head plunged into it ; and when one quits it another takes its 
place. These bees keep lengthening the cell as the worm grows older, 
and duly supply it with food, which they place before its mouth, and 
1 Thorley On Bees, 179. 3 Huber, i. 137, 
5 Reaumur, who was, however, unacquainted with this extraordinary fact, has 
figured one of these cells, v. #. 82. fi 3. h. 
