[5] Yellow Italian queens form an exception in point of colour. See [Plate I. Fig. I.]
It is the chief function of the queen to lay the eggs from which all future bees originate, the multiplication of the species being the purpose of her existence; and she follows it up with an assiduity similar to that with which the workers construct combs or collect honey. A queen will lay in the breeding season from 1,000 to 3,000 eggs a day. Both Langstroth and Von Berlepsch have seen queens lay at the rate of six per minute, or more; and the latter observer, on supplying his queen with some new empty comb, found at the end of twenty-four hours that she had laid 3,021 eggs, which at her observed speed she would accomplish in eight hours, and thus have sixteen for rest. She kept up to nearly this rate for twenty days, in which she filled 57,000 cells; and, what is still more surprising, she went on in like style for five years, during which, at the lowest reckoning, she laid. 1,300,000 eggs, or 300,000 per year. But with ordinary queens, says the Baron, 1,200 a day is excellently good work, and this rate from February to September, with allowance for slacker periods, will produce more than 150,000 bees in a year. "Most queens," says Dzierzon, "in spacious hives and at a favourable season, lay 60,000 in a month, ... and a specially fertile queen, in the four years which she on an average lives, lays over a million eggs." This is indeed a vast number; but when there is taken into consideration the multitudes required for swarms, the constant lessening of their strength by death in various ways, and the many casualties attending them in their distant travels in search of the luscious store, it does not seem that the case is overstated.
To keep up these heavy productive duties the queen requires to eat in corresponding proportions, and these she varies, or the bees vary them for her, in the same ratio with the laying itself. She sucks honey from the cells direct, or has it supplied to her by the workers; and, as an important additional fact, the latter regularly nourish her with pollen already partially digested in their own stomachs.
In a glass unicomb hive—which we shall hereafter describe—all the movements of the queen bee may be traced. She may be seen thrusting her head into a cell to discover whether it is occupied with an egg or honey, and, if empty, she turns round in a dignified manner and inserts her long body—so long that she is able to deposit the egg at the bottom of the cell; she then passes on to another, and so continues industriously multiplying her laborious subjects. It not unfrequently happens when the queen is prolific, and if it is an early season, that many eggs are wasted for want of unoccupied cells; for in that case the queen leaves them exposed at the bottom of the hive, where they are greedily devoured by the bees.
The queen bee, unlike the great majority of her subjects, is a stayer at home. On the second or third day of her princess life she usually sets out on the all-important concern of her marriage, and when once this is satisfactorily accomplished she never afterwards leaves the hive, except to lead off an emigrating swarm. Evans, with proper loyalty, has duly furnished a glowing epithalamium for the queen bee, thus:—
"But now, when noontide Sirius glares on high,
With him young love ascends the glowing sky,
From vein to vein swift shoots prolific fire,
And thrills each insect fibril with desire.
Thence, Nature, to fulfil thy prime decree,