706 
QUEENS 
Close view of eggs. Notice the cell in the lower left-hand corner contains two eggs, while that at the 
right-hand corner has a larva. 
which the queen lays the eggs; if they are 
few and scattering, and sometimes, or of¬ 
ten, in drone-cells, coupled with the fact 
that she did not commence laying until two 
weeks or more old, she should be replaced. 
A .young queen, if properly fertilized, 
never, or very rarely, lays an egg in a 
drone-cell; and when she commences to 
lay, she fills cell after cell in regular order, 
as men plant hills of corn; her work also 
has a neat and finished appearance that 
says at once to the expert, “She is all 
right.” 
In rare cases a young queen begins with 
all, or nearly all, drone eggs, but, after a 
while, lays entirely worker eggs as regu¬ 
larly as one could wish.* It is not known 
why this is; perhaps she has not yet got 
used to the “machinery.” Again, any queen 
is liable any day of her life to begin laying 
drone eggs altogether, or in part. A nice 
young laying queen, taken from a hive, and 
shipped to a distance, may prove to be a 
drone-layer shortly after or immediately 
* It has been suggested that this phenomenon 
may be accounted for by the fact that laying 
workers were in the hive before the young queen 
began to lay; that the drone eggs are not from 
the queen but the laying workers, and that, when 
the queen begins, she lays worker eggs at the 
very start, while the laying workers are de¬ 
stroyed, and hence the drone eggs disappear. This 
is possible. 
after she is received. Such things are not 
very common, but they do occur. Out of 
three or four hundred colonies one may 
find one drone-layer, on an average, each 
spring. During the summer, perhaps one 
more will be found. It may be that the 
queen was not fertilized sufficiently, and 
that the supply of spermatozoa gave out 
while she was in full vigor, thus reducing 
her to the condition of a virgin queen. 
Microscopic examination has shown an en¬ 
tire absence of spermatozoa in at least one 
or two instances where queens of this kind 
were killed and dissected. Similar experi¬ 
ments given by Dzierzon show that the 
spermatozoa may be injured beyond recov¬ 
ery by chilling the queen, and yet the queen 
herself be resuscitated. Hardship and be¬ 
ing shipped long distances may produce 
the same result. 
Queens not only turn suddenly to drone- 
layers, but they sometimes produce about 
an equal number of each kind of eggs. In 
all these cases, where the queen lays drone 
eggs when she evidently intended to lay 
worker eggs, they are in worker-cells; at 
the same time the number of eggs laid 
usually rapidly decreases. The bees, as 
well as queen, evidently begin to think that 
something is wrong; queen-cells are soon 
started, and after the young queen emerges 
