484 A DESCRIPTION OF 
Of Bees there are three kinds, the working Bees, the 
Drones, and the Queen. The Queen, or Parent Bee, is 
the soul of the hive ; to her all the rest are so attached, 
that they will follow her wherever she goes. If she dies 
all their labours are at an end, an universal mourning 
ensues, and all her subjects reject their food and fol- 
low her. Should a new queen arise, before this catas- 
trophe attends the hive, joy renovates their spirits, and 
their toils are renewed. This has been observed by re- 
moving the chrysalis of a Queen Bee from one hive to 
another which had lost its own empress. But this attach- 
ment is only in proportion to the utility she affords to 
the commonwealth. She is so prolific as to lay fifteen 
or eighteen thousand eggs, which produce about eight 
hundred males or drones, four or five Queen Bees, and 
the rest Working Bees or Neuters. Their cells differ in 
size ; the largest are for the males, the royal cells for the 
Queens, and the smallest for the neuters. The Parent 
Bee deposits in these cells such eggs as will produce the 
species for which they are respectively destined. In two 
or three days the eggs are hatched, when the Neuters turn 
nurses to the rest, whom they feed, most tenderly, with 
bee-bread and honey. After twenty-one days, the 
young Bees are ad)le to form cells, and with such indefa- 
tigable activity, that they will then do more, in one week's 
time, than during all the rest of the year. Sometimes 
there are Bees who, less laborious than the others, support 
themselves by pillaging the hives of the rest ; upon which 
a battle ensues between the industrious and the despoiling 
insects. Frequently contentions will arise among them, 
when a new colony seek their habitation in a hive already 
occupied. Their foes are the wasp, the hornet, and vari- 
ous kinds of birds. 
The Bee collects the honey by means of its proboscis, 
or trunk, which is a most astonishing piece of mechan- 
ism, consisting of more than twenty parts. Entering the 
