ourse to their old manoeuvres,
becoming manifestly insubordinate and unruly. If, however, they at any
time wax unbearable in their insolence, the young monarch has it in her
power, by assuming a singular attitude, standing erect at a little
distance, her wings crossed upon her back and slightly fluttering, while
she utters a shrill, slender sound, to strike them dumb, so that they
hang their heads for shame.

All this pretty story the later apiarists deem a tissue of fiction and
fallacy. If, when a hive is deprived of its queen, there happen to be a
royal egg remaining in it, they say, it will shortly produce a queen,
as, if it had been a common egg, it would have produced a common bee.
They insist that the organism of the creature to be produced is inherent
in the egg, and do not believe it in the power of a bee to alter a law
of Nature; they deny the statements of Schirach, Huber, Dunbar, Rennie,
and others to this effect,--scout the idea of the existence of such a
thing as royal jelly at all, with the supposed aristocracy of its
compounders,--share with Huber the amazement he says he felt, when, in a
time of disturbance, he distinctly heard a queen address her bees in
the French language, saying, "_Je suis ici, je suis ici_"--entirely
repudiate the royal duels, which the editor of the "Naturalist's
Library" himself, an advocate as he is of the Huberian principles,
confesses he has never, in all his experience, been able to
witness,--and go to the extreme of declaring, that, far from being the
truculent and jealous tyrant described, the queen is the most timid of
all creatures, flying, at the first intimation of danger, into the
depths of the hive, and never using her sting under any circumstances
through the whole course of her life, while, should you get one in your
hand, you may offer her indignities with impunity; she knows her value
to her people, and that, should she sting and be unable to withdraw her
barbed weapon, the effort would disembowel her, and prove her own death
and the ruin of her kingdom. The royal larvae, Huber tells us, in
spinning their cocoons, leave the lower rings of the body unprotected by
the gossamer envelope, that thus,--and it is certainly considerate on
their part,--the head being too well shielded by the hard nature of its
substances, and the cocoon endangering the safety of her sting by its
entangling flimsy threads, their queenly assailant may destroy them
without detriment to herself