29 
comb and nursing of brood, except the laying of eggs, 
is done by the workers. 
In queenless colonies, no longer having the requisite 
means of rearing a queen, common workers are some- 
times found to lay eggs from which drones, and only 
drones, proceed. Such laying workers are unfecund- 
ated, and eggs are uniformly layed by some individual 
bee, regarded more or less by her companions as their 
queen. So long as a fertile queen is present in the 
hive, the bees do not tolerate a fertile worker. Nor do 
they tolerate one while cherishing the hope of being 
able to rear a queen ; in rare instances, however, excep- 
tional cases occur. Fertile workers are sometimes found 
in hives immediately after the death of the queen, and 
even in the presence of a young queen so long as she 
has not herself become fertile. Such fertile workers 
are reared next to a queen cell, and some of the royal 
jelly, intended for the queen-larva, has accidently drop- 
ped into the next cell. Fertile workers will also lay 
their drone-producing eggs in cells of worker-size, 
from which dwarfed drones are reared (which usually 
die before emerging from their cells). In one instance 
bees attempted to rear a queen from such an egg, 
which proved upon opening the cell to be a drone 
drowned in the royal jelly. 
The age attained by workers reared in the spring is 
not more than two months. They generally work 
