PEKFECT SOCIETIES OF INSECTS. 



31 



and mother, of a new colony 1 : all that are not so fortunate 

 inevitably perish ; and, considering the infinite host of their 

 enemies, probably in the course of the following day. The 

 workers, as soon as this election takes place, begin to inclose 

 their new rulers in a small chamber of clay, before described, 

 suited to their size, the entrances to which are only large 

 enough to admit themselves and the neuters, but much too 

 small for the royal pair to pass through; — so that their state 

 of royalty is a state of confinement, and so continues during 

 the remainder of their existence. The impregnation of the 

 female is supposed to take place after this confinement, and 

 she soon begins to furnish the infant colony with new in- 

 habitants. The care of feeding her and her male companion 

 devolves upon the industrious larvae, who supply them both 

 with every thing that they want. As she increases in dimen- 

 sions, they keep enlarging the cell in which she is detained. 

 When the business of oviposition commences, they take the 

 eggs from the female, and deposit them in the nurseries. Her 

 abdomen now begins gradually to extend, till in process of 

 time it is enlarged to 1500 or 2000 times the size of the rest 

 of her body, and her bulk equals that of 20,000 or 30,000 

 workers. This part, often more than three inches in length, 

 is now a vast matrix of eggs, which make long circumvolu- 

 tions through numberless slender serpentine vessels: it is 

 also remarkable for its peristaltic motion (in this resembling 

 the female ant 2 ), which, like the undulations of water, pro- 

 duces a perpetual and successive rise and fall over the whole 

 surface of the abdomen, and occasions a constant extrusion 

 of the eggs, amounting sometimes in old females to sixty 

 in a minute, or eighty thousand and upwards in twenty-four 

 hours. 3 As these females live two years in their perfect state, 

 how astonishing must be the number produced in that time ! 

 This incessant extrusion of eggs must call for the attention 



1 In this these animals vary from the usual instinct of the social Hymenoptera, 

 the ants, the wasps, and the humble bees — with whom the females lay the first 

 foundations of the colonies, unassisted by any neuters ; — but in the swarms of 

 the hive bee an election may perhaps in some instances be said to take place. 



2 Gould's Account of English Ants, 22. 



3 John Hunter dissected two young queens. In the abdomen he found two 

 ovaries, consisting of many hundred oviducts, each containing innumerable 

 eggs. 



