Forty-six hours.after impregnation the queen be- s gins laying- eggs, which will become workers ; and, e provided impregnation takes place within the first twenty days of her existence, thousands are produced uninterruptedly during the succeeding eleven months. Then she commences laying eggs which will be drones. But should matters be otherwise arranged ; should her impregnation, either from constraint or accident, be delayed more than twenty days beyond her own complete metamorphosis, a singular alteration takes place. She begins laying within forty-six hours of its occurrence, but no eggs excepting those from which drones proceed ; nor will she lay any other -kind during her whole life. A nice and difficult pro blem thence arises, which analogy does not aid us to solve. 'How is the order of nature so completely in verted` by retarded impregnation ? The eggs produ: ;sing males require, in the natural state, eleven months to attain maturity ; but, under the effects of this ac cidental occurrence, they reach perfection in forty-six hours. Those eggs which should have preceded them, during eleven nionths, in many thousands, totally dis appear, and from no other sensible Sonic vi tiation has ensued, which, while it destroys the vita lity of which the workers' eggs are susceptible, ope rates such a change, as to bring those of the males eleven months earlier to maturity. Orrreflecting that a simple copulation is sufficient to impregnate all the eggs which a queen will lay in two years, or, perhaps, the whole that she will lay during her life, the ques tion becomes still more embarrassing. Without be ing aware of the cause of such peculiarities, some ob servers have maintained, that there were certain spe cies of queens, from which no description of bees, ex cepting drones, would be generated ; which they justly determined was extremely injurious to their re spective colonies.
The laying of a queen is retarded, or altogether interrupted, by cold ; and one impregnated in the end of October has been known to retain her eggs four months and a half, owing to the intervention of win ter. This queen, during March and April, laid above :3000 eggs, producing males only ; and so very pro lific are these insects, that a single queen may he the mother of 12,000 bees, or more, in the spay of two months, which is laying at the rate of 200 eggs dai ly. The queen before depositing an egg, examines whether the cell is clean and fit to receive 4, and also suitable to its future state ; for queens, males, and workers, have cells peculiarly adapted to their kind, and the queen, by anticipation, seems aware which of these will proceed from the egg she deposits. Those producing workers are deposited in common horizon= tal cells ; but the cells containing the eggs which will be transformed into queens are large and rudely con structed with a great quantity of wax, and hang per , pendicularly hive. When the egg is laid, the bees supply the 11 with the pollen of flowers, which serves to feed the young worm coming from it.
The eggs of all the three kinds of bees are hatch ed in three days ; a fact apparently of trifling import, but which it is essential for the cultivator to learn.
A worker then remains five days in the vermicular state ; a male six and a half ; and a queen five. The workers' worm occupies thirty-six hours in spinning its silken envelope or coccoon ; in three days it changes to a nymph ; and only on the twentieth day of its existence does it become a complete or perfect winged animal. The drones arc still longer of at taining their last metamorphosis, which succeeds in twenty-four days after the egg has been laid. But the queen comes to perfection in sixteen days.
Food is carried by the bees to the worms as they require it : but when ready to transform to a nymph, they are aware that it is no longer necessary ; on the contrary, the mouth of the cell is sealed with a co vering of wax formed of concentric circles from the edge, convex if including males, and flat if including workers. The same cell may successively bring dif ferent workers to maturity : after one has left it, the bees clean the inside, and the mother again lays there ; but the cells containing eggs which become queens are used no more than once. When the perfect in sect escapes, the cell is usually destroyed.
While treating of the origin and imperfect state of bees, we cannot omit observing, that although, ge nerally speaking, the queen is the parent of the whole, yet there are some workers, (at least some bees so much resembling workers, that there is no per ceptible difference,) which lay eggs. Their ovaries are smaller, more fragile, and composed of fewer oviducts than those of queens; and the eggs, like the eggs of queens whose fecundation has been re tarded, produce male bees only, and neither queens nor workers. This singular fact, added to another not less so, on which we shall immediately make a few remarks, strongly tends to establish, that all work: ing bees are originally of the female sex ; and that in the ordinary case their ovaries arc vitiated, and become unfit for laying any eggs except those transforming to males.
M. Schirach, an eminent naturalist, that in certain circumstances the animal destined to be come a worker could actually be converted into a queen ; and that this conversion was in the power of the bees, by means of a particular mode of treatment bestowed on the worm while in an early stage. He thence concluded, that every queen is originally a worker, which, without the particular treatment ad minstered, would have remained a worker, but having undergone this treatment, it is converted to a queen ; and that the bees, to attain the conversion, selected the worm when three days old. Nevertheless it is in dubitable, that .specific eggs are laid in royal cells and hatched into queens, which, according to the most credible and satisfactory experiments, never would have produced workers. It is surely to avoid the fatal consequences which would attend twenty or thirty thousand animals on the loss of a single life, that they have been endowed with such uncommon prerogatives.