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Rh love, and any sort of a prince, however lowly, is acceptable. Thus does many a fine, highly bred queen return to her hive, to bestow upon her progeny the undesirable traits of some low-bred drone. This is one reason why it is so difficult to keep an apiary of pure blood; and these mésalliances of queens are a source of much tribulation to the bee-keeper. She returns from her wedding journey with a part of the reproductive organs of her mate in her possession, often still visible, but soon after withdrawn into her body. With the sperm cells now under her control, she will fertilise the eggs of perhaps a million workers, more or less, which she may mother during her life of three or four years.

Biologists have of late achieved the miraculous in being able to stimulate the unfertilised eggs of sea-urchins and starfish, so that they will develop. The queen bee is able to do this with her own eggs. When the time comes for drones to be developed, she lays unfertilised eggs, which, unfailingly, produce the drones. If our poor human queens possessed this power of producing male heirs at will, much trouble would have been saved to many of them and, to some of them, their heads. However, the perfect socialists do most things better than we.

As soon as the queen returns from her honeymoon, which is usually taken from eight to ten days from the time she issues, she acts decidedly like a business person. She runs about on the comb, pokes her head into a cell to see if it is all ready, and then, turning about, thrusts her abdomen in and neatly glues an