S22 
NATURAL HISTORY. 
worm is excluded from the shell of the egg, having the ap- 
pearance of a maggot rolled up in a ring, and lying on a 
soft bed of a whitish coloured jelly ; upon which also the 
little animal begins to feed. In the mean time, the instant 
it appears, the working bees attend it with the most anxious 
and parental tenderness. Thus attended, and plentifully 
fed, the worm, in less than six days time, comes to its full 
growth, and no longer accepts the food offered it. When 
the bees perceive that it has no further occasion for feeding, 
they perform the last offices of tenderness, and shut the 
little animal up in its cell ; walling up the mouth of its 
apartment with wax; there they leave the worm to itself ; 
having secured it from every external injury. 
The worm is no sooner left enclosed, but, from a state of 
inaction, it begins to labour, extending and shortening its 
body ; and by this means lining the walls of its apartment 
with a silken tapestry, which it spins in the manner of cater- 
pillars, before they undergo their last transformation. When 
their cell is thus prepared, the animal is soon after trans- 
formed into an amelia; but differing from that of the com- 
mon caterpillar, as it exhibits not only the legs, but the 
wings of the future bee, in its present state of inactivity. 
Thus, in about twenty, or one-and-twenty days after the egg 
is laid, the bee is completely formed, and fitted to undergo 
the fatigues of its state. When all its parts have acquired 
their proper strength and consistence, the young animal 
opens its prison, by piercing with its teeth the waxen door 
that confines it. When just freed from its cell, it is as yet 
moist, and incommoded with the spoils of its former situa- 
tion ; but the officious bees are soon seen to flock round it, 
and to lick it clean on all sides with their trunks ; while 
another band, with equal assiduity, are observed to feed it 
with honey : others again begin immediately to cleanse the 
cell that has been just left ; to carry the ordures out of the 
hive, and to fit the place for a new inhabitant. The young 
bee soon repays their care by its industry ; for as soon as 
ever its external parts become dry, it discovers its natural 
appetite for labour, and industriously begins the task, which 
it pursues unremittingly through life. The toil of man is 
irksome to him, and he earns his subsistence with pain ; but 
this little animal seems happy in its pursuits, and finds delight 
in all its employments. 
When bees first begin to break their prisons, there are 
generally above an hundred excluded in one day. Thus, in 
the space of a few weeks, the number of the inhabitants in 
one hive, of a moderate size, becomes so great, that there is 
