Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/827

Rh queen to take her place. Sometimes, however, the old, worn-out mother is permitted to remain in the hive while the young one is being reared, and ultimately dies of neglect and depression, or is assisted to "shuffle off" by her own unfilial progeny. The queen is reared from the same egg as the worker, but in a much larger cell, nearly perpendicular, and on different food, called "royal jelly," which has the effect of fully developing the sexual apparatus. The time from the egg to the perfect queen emerged from the cell is about sixteen days. In a few days after hatching, the young queen leaves the hive for her "bridal flight," during which, and on the wing, she meets the male bee or drone in copulation and becomes impregnated, when she returns to the hive to remain there until she leads out the first swarm, which she does when she finds young queens being reared in the hive—one of them designed to take her place. A single fertile queen in a colony is the normal condition of the household, and hence the old queen departs to make room for her successor. Second and third swarms are of course led out by the young queens. With the exception of sometimes attacking and destroying inchoate queens, the sole function of the queen is to deposit eggs and lead out the first swarm. After her impregnation she deposits both drone and worker eggs—either kind at pleasure. She is capable, however, as a virgin queen, of laying fertile drone, but not worker, eggs. This apparently anomalous fact (parthenogenesis) is now well established, not only in the case of the virgin queen-bee, but in that of several other insects. Sometimes worker-bees in queenless colonies lay fertile drone-eggs; but the queen is the only fully developed female in the colony.

The worker-bees, though "the bone and sinew" of the hive, are not blest with the queen's longevity. In active work, on the wing and off, during the honey-season, they naturally live but a few weeks—from one to two months—while those hatched late in the fall will live until spring, sometimes reaching the age of nine months and upward, which is the maximum longevity of the worker-bee. In passing from the egg to the perfect bee, the worker occupies twenty-one days. The young worker spends several days (from ten to fifteen) at home building comb, attending to the young brood, receiving and depositing the loads of the outside workers, and sundry other little duties, before it ventures to the fields to work. The duties of the older workers of the colony are to gather honey, pollen, and propolis, destroy and cast out the drones when necessary, and defend the colony from enemies without or within. They also, as already noticed, destroy old, unprolific queens and rear young ones to take their places, and sometimes lead out in swarming, as the queen does not always take the lead in swarming. And although very young bees are ordinarily very reluctant to leave the hive, I have seen such rush out under the swarming impulse so young that they couldn't fly more than a foot or two, if at all. They usually crawl back home again in apparent disgust