Page:Jardine Naturalist's library Bees.djvu/67

Rh kept looking at her for some minutes before we restored the captive to her alarmed defenders. It is remarkable that this violence was not resented by them; though they coursed over our hands in scores, while we kept hold of their mistress, not one individual used its sting. The all engrossing object was the Queen. They may be handled, and roughly too, with like impunity when they are swarming. Intent then only on securing a habitation for themselves and their sovereign, they seem incapable of entertaining at the same moment two different ideas, if we may use such an expression, and their natural irritability is not awakened to exertion.

There is a fact connected with the instinct of the Queen in laying her eggs, which deserves particular notice, and which we have not seen stated by any other writer on the subject of Bees. When she has laid a cluster of eggs to the number of thirty or forty, more or less according to circumstances, on one side of the comb; instead of laying in all the empty cells in the same quarter, she removes to the other side, and lays in the cells which are directly opposite to those which she has just supplied with eggs, and, generally speaking, in none else. This mode of proceeding is of a piece with that wise arrangement which runs through all the operations of the Bees, and is another effect of that remarkable instinct by which they are guided. For as they cluster closely in those parts of the comb which are filled with brood, in order to concentrate the heat