THE STORY OF THE QUEEN
Among most nations it is customary for the kingship to be handed down
from father to son, but no such rule exists in the bee-city. Although
we call one of the bees the Queen, she is not really a queen in the
ordinary sense of the word. She does not rule the hive, nor can she
command the bees to do this thing or that, and a far better name for
her would be the Mother bee.
Up to the seventeenth century it was thought that a hive was ruled
over by a king-bee, and it was not known that this large bee was the
mother of all the other bees, and yet this is so, as we have already
seen. Whether or not a queen shall be born depends on the wish of the
workers, and it is surprising to find that a queen is developed from
an ordinary egg, which, if it were not subjected to certain different
processes, would turn into a worker bee.
[Illustration: PLATE XXII
From a photograph by] [E. Hawks
An Empty Queen Cell]
When the bees desire that a queen shall be born, the builders and
sculptors are first consulted. They set to work to make three or four
queen cells, or, as we might call them, royal cradles; in one of them
the future queen will be reared. We have already seen that queen cells
are different from the ordinary cells, and that for their accommodation
a part of the comb is cut away. This gives better ventilation, and
the royal cells hang downwards from the comb as seen in Plate XXI. The
nurse bees now place in the first an egg from one of the worker cells,
but this egg must not be more than three days old, otherwise a queen
would not be produced, no matter what efforts the bees might make.
Eggs are placed in the other cells at intervals of three days. On the
fourth day the first egg hatches into a grub, just as it did in the
case of the worker bee, whose career it resembles up to this stage. But
now the nurse bees, instead of feeding it upon chyle food, commence
to supply it with “royal jelly” as it is called. This is a very rich
form of food, and is only given to those grubs which it is intended
shall become queens. The nurse bees continue to pay special attention
to the little grub, and give it as much of the royal jelly as it can
take. This goes on until the ninth day, when the grub spins a cocoon
and the cell is closed up. On the sixteenth day from the time the egg
was laid the young princess will be ready to leave her cell; she will
then commence to gnaw the floor in order that she may get out. In Plate
XXII. there is shown an empty queen cell, the floor of which has been
cut away in this manner.
Thus we see that the making of the queen rests entirely with the
workers themselves, and depends simply on an egg being placed in
a certain kind of cell, and having special food and plenty of
ventilation. After the queen has been hatched, the royal cell is cut
away, and its place filled with honey cells. The wax of the cell is not
wasted, but used in the construction of new comb.