PERFECT SOCIETIES OF INSECTS. 



109 



duals that compose the society of the bee-hive more in detail 

 than I should otherwise have done, in order that you may be 

 the better able to form a judgment 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 re- 

 mained 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 than three days old ; and this is the age at w^hich, ac- 

 cording to Schirach (the first apiarist who called the public 

 attention to this miracle of nature), the bees usually elect the 

 larvae to be royally educated ; though it appears from Huber's 

 observations, that a larva two days or even twenty-four hours 

 old will do. 1 Having chosen a grub, they remove the inhabit- 

 ants 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 direction, 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 in- 

 habits this cell, like the common royal cells now become ver- 

 tical 2 , a bee may always be observed with its head plunged 

 into it ; and when one quits it another takes its place. These 



1 Huber, i. 137. 



2 Reaumur, who was, however, unacquainted with this extraordinary fact, has 

 figured one of these cells, v. t. 32. /. 3. h. 



