place) with one bee a-hold of your collar or the hair of your head, and
another a-hold of each arm or leg, and still another feeling for your
waistbands with his sting, the odds are greatly against you.

It is a singular fact, also, that the queen is made, not born. If the
entire population of Spain or Great Britain were the offspring of one
mother, it might be found necessary to hit upon some device by which a
royal baby could be manufactured out of an ordinary one, or else give
up the fashion of royalty. All the bees in the hive have a common
parentage, and the queen and the worker are the same in the egg and in
the chick; the patent of royalty is in the cell and in the food; the
cell being much larger, and the food a peculiar stimulating kind of
jelly. In certain contingencies, such as the loss of the queen with no
eggs in the royal cells, the workers take the larva of an ordinary bee,
enlarge the cell by taking in the two adjoining ones, and nurse it and
stuff it and coddle it, till at the end of sixteen days it comes out a
queen. But ordinarily, in the natural course of events, the young queen
is kept a prisoner in her cell till the old queen has left with the
swarm. Later on, the unhatched queen is guarded against the reigning
queen, who only wants an opportunity to murder every royal scion in the
hive. At this time both the queens, the one a prisoner and the other at
large, pipe defiance at each other, a shrill, fine, trumpet-like note
that any ear will at once recognize. This challenge, not being allowed
to be accepted by either party, is followed, in a day or two, by the
abdication of the reigning queen; she leads out the swarm, and her
successor is liberated by her keepers, who, in her time, abdicates in
favor of the next younger. When the bees have decided that no more
swarms can issue, the reigning queen is allowed to use her stiletto
upon her unhatched sisters. Cases have been known where two queens
issued at the same time, when a mortal combat ensued, encouraged by the