gets ready and goes away.  And this explains why princesses’ eggs are laid a few days apart, for if they were laid all on the same day, there would be no time for one princess to go off with a swarm before the other came out of her cell.  Sometimes, when the workers are not watchful enough, two queens do meet, and then they fight till one is killed; or sometimes they both go off with the same swarm without finding each other out.  But this only delays the fight till they get into the new hive; sooner or later one must be killed.

And now a third queen begins to reign in the old hive, and she is just as restless as the preceding ones, for there are still more princesses to be born.  But this time, if no new swarm wants to start, the workers do not try to protect the royal cells.  The young queen darts at the first she sees, gnaws a hole with her jaws, and, thrusting in her sting through the hole in the cocoon, kills the young bee while it is still a prisoner.  She then goes to the next, and the next, and never rests till all the young princesses are destroyed.  Then she is contented, for she knows no other queen will come to dethrone her.  After a few days she takes her flight in the air with the drones, and comes home to settle down in the hive for the winter.

Then a very curious scene takes place.  The drones are no more use, for the queen will not fly out again, and these idle bees will never do any work in the hive.  So the worker-bees begin to kill them, falling upon them, and stinging them to death, and as the drones have no stings they cannot defend themselves, and in a few days there is not a drone, nor even a drone-egg, left in the hive.  This massacre seems very sad to us, since the poor drones have never done any harm beyond being hopelessly idle.  But it is less sad when we know that they could not live many weeks, even if they were not attacked, and, with winter coming, the bees cannot afford to feed useless mouths, so a quick death is probably happier for them than starvation.

And now all the remaining inhabitants of the hive settle down to feeding the young bees and laying in the winter’s store.  It is at this time, after they have been toiling and saving, that we come and take their honey; and from a well-stocked hive we may even take 30 lbs. without starving the industrious little inhabitants.  But then we must often feed them in return and give them sweet syrup in the late autumn and the next early spring when they cannot find any flowers.

Although the hive has now become comparatively quiet and the work goes on without excitement, yet every single bee is employed in some way, either out of doors or about the hive.  Besides the honey collectors and the nurses, a certain number of bees are told off to ventilate the hive.  You will easily understand that where so many insects are packed closely together the heat will become very great, and the air impure and unwholesome.  And the bees have no windows