PERFECT SOCIETIES OF INSECTS. 



119 



In the formicary, as we have seen, rival queens live together 

 very harmoniously without molesting each other ; but there 

 is that instinctive jealousy in a queen bee, that no sooner does 

 she discover the existence of another in the hive than she is 

 put into a state of the most extreme agitation, and is not 

 easy until she has attacked and destroyed her. 



Naturalists had observed that when there were two queens 

 in the same hive, one of them soon perished ; but some sup- 

 posed (this was the opinion of Schirach and Biem) that the 

 workers destroyed the supernumeraries. Reaumur, however, 

 conjectured that these queens attacked each other ; and his 

 conjecture has been since confirmed by the actual observation 

 of other naturalists. Blassiere, the translator of Schirach, 

 tells us, as what he had himself witnessed, that the strongest 

 queen kills her rival with her sting ; and the same is asserted 

 by Huber, whose opportunities of observation were greater 

 than those of any of his precursors. 1 



The queen that is first liberated from her confinement, and 

 has assumed the perfect or imago state (it is to be supposed 

 that the author is here speaking of a hive which has lost the 

 old queen), soon after this event goes to visit the royal cells 

 that are still inhabited. She darts with fury upon the first 

 with which she meets ; by means of her jaws she gnaws a 

 hole large enough to introduce the end of her abdomen, and 

 with her sting, before the included female is in a condition to 

 defend herself or resist her attack, she gives her a mortal 

 wound. The workers, who remain passive spectators of this 

 assassination, after she quits the victim of her jealousy, en- 

 large the breach that she has made, and drag forth the carcass 

 of a queen just emerged from the thin membrane that en- 

 velops the pupa. If the object of her attack be still in the 

 pupa state, she is stimulated by a less violent degree of rage, 

 and contents herself with making a breach in the cell : when 

 this happens, the death of the inclosed insect is equally 

 certain, for the workers enlarge the breach, pull it out, and 

 it perishes. 2 If it happens, as it sometimes does, that two 

 queens are disclosed at the same time, the care of Provi- 



1 Schirach, 209. note*. Huber, i. 170. 2 Huber, i. 171. 



I 4 



