370 PERFECT SOCIETIES OF INSECTS. 
quillity only while she keeps at a distance from them. As her instinct jg 
constantly urging her to attack them, this proceeding is frequently 
repeated. Sometimes, standing in a particular and commanding attitude, 
she utters that authoritative sound which so much affects the bees ; they 
then all hang down their heads and remain motionless ; but as soon as it 
ceases, they resume their opposition. At last she becomes violently agi- 
tated, and communicating her agitation to others, the confusion more and 
more increases, till a swarm leaves the hive, which she either precedes op 
follows. In the same manner the other young queens are treated while 
there are swarms to go forth; but when the hive is sufficiently thinned, 
and it becomes troublesome to guard them in the manner here described, 
they come forth unnoticed, and fight unimpeded till one alone remains to 
fill the deserted throne of the parent hive. You see here the reason why 
the eggs that produce these queens are not laid at the same time, but after 
some interval, that they may come forth successively. For did they all 
make their appearance together, it would be a much more laborious and 
difficult task to keep them from destroying each other. 
When the bees thus delay the entrance of the young queens into their 
world, they invariably let out the oldest first; and they probably know 
their progress to maturity by the emission of the sound lately mentioned, 
The accurate Huber took the trouble to mark all the royal cells in a hive 
as soon as the workers had covered them in, and he found that they were 
all liberated according to seniority. Those first covered first emit the 
sound, and so on successively; whence he conjectures that this is the sign 
by which the workers discover their age. As their captivity, howeyer, is 
sometimes prolonged to eight or ten days, this circumstance in that time 
may be forgotten. In this case he supposes that their tones grow stronger 
as they grow older, by which the workers may be enabled to distinguish 
them. It is remarkable that no guard is placed round the mute queens 
bred according to the Lusatian method, which, when the time for their ape 
pearance is come, are not detained in captivity a single moment; but, as 
you have heard, are left to fight, conquer, or die. 
You must not think, however, from what I have been. saying, that the 
old queen never destroys the young ones previously to her leading forth 
the earliest swarm, She is allowed the most uncontrolled liberty of action ; 
and if she chooses to approach and destroy the royal cells, her subjects do 
not oppose her. It sometimes happens, when unfayourable weather retards 
the first swarm, that all the royal progeny perishes by the sting of their 
mother, and then no swarm takes place. It is to be observed that she 
never attacks a royal cell till its inhabitant is ready to assume the pupa; 
therefore much will depend upon their age. When they arrive at this 
state, her horror of these cells, and aversion to them, are extreme :-she 
attacks, perhaps, and destroys several; but finding it too laborious, for 
they are often numerous, to destroy the whole, the same agitation is caused 
in her as if she were forcibly prevented, and she becomes disposed to depart, 
rather than remain in the midst of her rivals, though her own offspring. 
But though the bees, in one of these cases, appear such unconcerne 
spectators of the destruction of royal personages, or rather the applauders 
and ineiters of the bloody fact, and in the other show little respect to them, 
put such a restraint upon their persons, and manifest such disregard to 
1 Huber, i. 286, 
