The Queen is very elegant. Her symmetry of person, and relative
proportions, and greater length of figure, distinguish her from the rest
of the community. Her death is followed by a cessation of all labour till
a princess ascends the throne. She is the creature of treatment. The egg
from which she emerges seems in all respects identical with those from
which her subjects issue. On the sides of the tier of comb from which
drones and working-bees are developed, large vertical combs, from two to
five, are constructed. Woodcuts representing these are found in every
bee-book. Taylor gives the following accurate picture:--
[Illustration]
The upper portion of the comb contains honey, with the exception of the
dark cells, which contain pollen. The lower are drone cells; and the large
cells, three in number on each side, are royal palaces. Her majesty is fed
with royal jelly till she is ready to show herself; and everything that
love and reverence and hope can supply, the bees delight to offer. But it
is a curious entomological fact, first discovered by Schirach, an eminent
apiarian of the last century, that the bees can supply the loss of their
queen by an artificial process--a process confirmatory of the position
that every working-bee egg has in it the component elements of royalty,
and that development according to a definite treatment is all that is
requisite to constitute a queen. On being deprived of their queen by
death, the bees select a common grub, not above three days old, break down
the wax partitions between it and at least three contiguous cells, forming
a vertical pear-shaped chamber. They feed her with the daintiest food,
called royal jelly. In five days the grub becomes a nymph, and in fifteen
she emerges a royal princess, ascends the vacant throne, and receives the
homage, loyalty, and love of fifteen or twenty thousand subjects. Kirby
exclaims:--
"What! you will ask, can a larger and warmer house, a different and
more pungent food, and a vertical instead of an horizontal posture,
give a bee a different-shaped tongue and mandibles; render the surface
of its under-legs flat instead of concave; deprive them of the fringe
of hairs that forms the basket for carrying the masses of pollen,--of
the auricle and pecten which enable the workers to use these legs or
feet as pincers,--of the brush that lines the insides of the feet?
Can they lengthen its abdomen; alter its colour and clothing; give
a curvature to its sting; deprive it of its wax-pockets, and of the
vessels for secreting that substance; and render its ovaries more
conspicuous and capable of yielding worker and drone eggs?"
In spring, she moves among the combs laying her eggs. Ladies-in-waiting
accompany her, who always turn their faces toward her majesty, clear the
royal route, and clean out the cells in which she deposits her eggs.