Page:Jardine Naturalist's library Bees.djvu/101

Rh to the honey cells for that purpose, she had to scramble, often with great difficulty, over the crowd, not an individual of which got out of her way, or seemed to care whether she fed or starved. But no sooner did she become a mother than the scene was changed indeed, and all vied in testifying their affection and regard; one after another presented her proboscis with food, and at every step of her progress, a circle was formed around her by her admiring subjects. The other circumstance alluded to, which varies from the experience of Huber, respects the vigilance of the workers in such cases, and the sound emitted by the queens. He says, that the workers form no guard around the cells of artificial queens, and that these last are perfectly mute; and the Naturalist makes some remarks by way of accounting for it. The above experiment is completely in contradiction to this. The cell of the younger queen was most strictly guarded, and both emitted the sounds alluded to, perhaps once every minute, for several hours together.—To these experiments we have only to add farther, that, as already stated, we have very frequently repeated the same operation, and always with success; and that in the summer of 1832, we removed the reigning queen of the same experimental hive three times successively, suffering each queen to remain just long enough to lay a score or two of eggs before her removal; and each time the workers laid the foundations of five or six royal cells, and brought two or three Queens to