THE WORKERS OR COMMON BEES.

The number of workers in a hive varies very much. A good swarm ought to
contain 15,000 or 20,000; and in large hives, strong colonies which are
not reduced by swarming, frequently number two or three times as many,
during the height of the breeding season. We have well-authenticated
instances of stocks much more populous than this. The Polish hives will
hold several bushels, and yet we are informed by Mr. Dohiogost, that
they swarm regularly, and that the swarms are so powerful that "they
resemble a little cloud in the air." I shall hereafter consider how the
size of the hive affects the number of bees that it may be expected to
produce.

The workers, (as has been already stated,) are all females whose ovaries
are too imperfectly developed to admit of their laying eggs. For a long
time, they were regarded as neither males nor females, and were called
Neuters; but more careful microscopic examinations have enabled us to
detect the rudiments of their ovaries, and thus to determine their sex.
The accuracy of these examinations has been verified by the well-known
facts respecting _fertile workers_.

Riem, a German Apiarian, first discovered that workers sometimes lay
eggs. Huber, in the course of his investigations on this subject,
ascertained that such workers were raised in hives that had lost their
queen, and in the vicinity of the royal cells in which young queens were
being reared. He conjectured that they received accidentally, a small
portion of the peculiar food of these infant queens, and in this way, he
accounted for their reproductive organs being more developed than those
of other workers. Workers reared in such hives, are in close proximity
to the young queens, and there is certainly much probability that some
of the royal jelly may be accidentally dropped into their cells; as, in
these hives, the queen cells when first commenced are parallel to the
horizon, instead of being perpendicular to it, as they are in other
hives. I do not feel confident, however, that they are not sometimes
bred in hives which have not lost their queen. The kind of eggs laid by
these fertile workers, has already been noticed. Such workers are seldom
tolerated in hives containing a fertile, healthy queen, though instances
of this kind have been known to occur. The worker is much smaller than
either the queen or the drone.[5] It is furnished with a tongue or
proboscis, of the most curious and complica