334 
BRITISH BEES. 
each queen successively issues forth upon her bridal 
morn, to catch her favouring glances, and be the ac¬ 
cepted groom. That they are not further conducive to 
the well-being of the hive is the fault of their structure 
and of their instinct, which are correlative, they being 
as little fitted either in their tongue or their legs for the 
uses of the hive as the queen herself. The physiology 
of their intercourse is a mystery of mysteries, and would 
seem to partake of the principle, modified, of that deve¬ 
loped in the aphides, where the vital power passes on 
through successive generations by the efficiency of the 
energy of one ancestral intercourse. In the hive-bee 
this is not the case, but in these the one espousal fer¬ 
tilizes eggs to the number of often a hundred thousand, 
yet undeveloped and even indiscernible by the aid of 
the microscope in the ovaries of the queen, and which 
become bees progressively in the course of a couple of 
years, the supposed duration of her existence, during 
the whole of which time she is laying. The accepted 
male is destroyed by the effects of the amour, and when 
all the queens which are to be the heads of independent 
communities are successively fertilized, and have led 
forth their colonies, the remaining drones issue compul¬ 
sively from the hive and are lost in the wideness of na¬ 
ture, and die by the natural limitation of their existence, 
or become the prey of their numerous enemies. 
The neuters or workers are, as it were, emanations of 
the queen, or the organs whereby her several functions 
as a mother are performed, considering the species as 
restricted to two sexes, and thus they comprise with her, 
collectively, one organic whole. That this is a consistent 
view of their condition is further proved by the circum¬ 
stance that from their larvse, upon the failure of a queen, 
