Meanwhile Alice was taking out one comb after another, glancing at each and replacing it, till she came at last to the most marvelous thing in the world of bees—the mystery of the queen-cells.
There they were, five or six on a single comb, great, peanut shaped protuberances, some sealed with a rounded capping, others still open at the tip, showing the white young queen within, floating in a mass of royal jelly.
For when the bees become queenless, they have the science to rear a new one to save the colony from perishing. An ordinary worker-egg that is just hatching into the larva is profusely fed with royal jelly, that strangely prepared food of which no one knows the exact composition. Instead of growing in the ordinary cell, the larva is given one of these great waxen cones for its nursery; and instead of hatching in twenty-one days into a worker bee, it hatches in sixteen into a fully fledged virgin queen. The first preparation for swarming is the starting of a batch of these queen-cells, so that the colony shall not be left queenless when the queen departs with the swarm, and the swarm does not leave till some of the cells are sealed over.
Whenever a queen loses her life, or grows so old as to be useless, the same sort of queen-cells are started to replace her. The only exception is when a queen dies in the winter, and there are no eggs from which a new one can be reared; and then, unless man gives help, the colony quickly vanishes.
Carl had seen queen-cells often enough before, but he never ceased to regard them with amazement. He peeped into an unsealed cell, took out a little of the thick, white, royal jelly and tasted it on the end of a twig.
“Rich, thick, sour, and sweet all at once,” he commented. “It turns a worker into a queen. I wonder what it would do to me if I ate a lot of it.”
“You’d be a king,” said Alice, promptly. “Put those cells back. They’ll get chilled. And let’s go and catch that swarm.”
Carl had a number of hives prepared for such emergencies, each with ten new frames of foundation. The old hive, now out of action, they carried away to a new stand, and placed the prepared hive where it had stood. Upon it they put the partly-filled super that the swarm had left.
Alice now brought out the large water-pail from the house, and they walked down to where the swarm was settled. It still clung there in a big, brown, murmuring, pearl-shaped mass. There they would probably hang for hours, till they had decided in their mysterious councils what hollow tree in the forest they would make for.
But they were not to leave man’s control. Carl climbed a little way into the tree, then, leaning far out, slipped the tin pail close under the swarm and shook the branch smartly. With a thump the whole mass dropped into the pail, not a bee flying. They seethed and flowed like molasses, while Carl hastily jumped down, ran to the hive he had prepared, and poured them down at its entrance.