HIE HONEY-BEE. 
03 
kept looking at lier for some minutes before we re- 
stored the captive to her alarmed defenders. It is 
remarkable that this violence was not resented by 
them ; though they coursed over our hands in scores, 
while we kept hold of their mistress, not one indivi- 
dual used its sting. The all engrossing object was 
the Queen. They may be handled, and roughly too, 
with like impunity when they are swarming. Intent 
then only on securing a habitation for themselves and 
their sovereign, they seem incapable of entertaining 
at the same moment two different ideas, if we may 
use such an expression, and their natural irritability 
is not awakened to exertion. 
There is a fact connected with the instinct of the 
Queen in laying her eggs, which deserves particular 
notice, and which we have not seen stated by any 
other writer on the subject of Bees.* When she 
has laid a cluster of eggs to the number of thirty or 
forty, more or less according to circumstances, on 
one side of the comb ; instead of laying in all the 
empty cells in the same quarter, she removes to the 
other side, and lays in the cells which are directly 
opposite to those which she has just supplied with 
eggs, and, generally speaking, in none else. This 
mode of proceeding is of a piece with that wise ar- 
rangement which runs through all the operations of 
the Bees, and is another effect of that remarkable 
instinct by which they are guided. For as they clus- 
ter closely in those parts of the comb which are filled 
with brood, in order to concentrate the heat neces- 
* The writer stated this fact several years ago in the Edin- 
burgh Philosophical Journal. 
