the scientists; even now after a century of study her growth is as miraculous as ever; and the problems in physiology that lie as yet unsolved in her development will keep many an investigator busy in the future.
When a colony is queenless, and has young brood or unhatched eggs, it makes haste to develop new queens; not one alone, but several, since it cannot afford to put its "eggs all in one basket." At the height of the honey season, every day that a colony is queenless means two or three thousand less bees than should be present to make it successful in securing the harvest. (Plate V.)
In developing a queen the bees usually proceed as follows: They select the important egg, which differs in no wise from any other worker egg, and destroying the partitions between its cell and two adjoining cells, give it more room. In order to make the royal apartment of good size a projection is built out over this large cell. This is made of thick wax and ornamented on the outside with hexagonal fretwork, as if it were to be the basis of comb with small cells. It seems as if the hexagonal pattern were in the bee brain and must be expressed, whether it be of any use or not. As soon as the little white larva hatches from the egg, it is fed on the regular larval food. Royal jelly is a food developed in the head glands of the workers; and when it is the fate of a bee larva to develop into a worker, it is fed with this food for three days, and then it is weaned by having other food substituted; but the queen larva is fed with it during her entire development, and there-
