They consist of ten or twelve or sometimes more, and have been previously described. They are replaced by others as they quit to obey orders, or as they retire fatigued, so that she is always surrounded. The number of eggs she will lay in a day is about two hundred. In doing this she first thrusts her head into a cell to ascertain its fitness, which having done, she withdraws it, and then curving her body she thrusts the apex of her abdomen, which tapers to the extremity for the purpose, into the cell, wherein by means of the sheaths of her curved sting, which act as an ovipositor, she places the egg at the bottom of the cell. It is possibly from some taction of this instrument that she discerns the sizes of the eggs, and thence their respective sex. This process she continues repeating, passing from one side of the comb to the other by means of the passages perforated through it, making the numbers as nearly as possible tally on each side and as opposite to each other as may be, and she will then go forward to further cakes of comb. In this way she lays about ten or twelve thousand in six weeks, depending much upon the propitiousness of the season, but the rapidity of this laying intermits according to the months; the above estimate is based upon what April and May produce, as it slackens during the summer heats and again revives in the autumn, but totally terminates with the first cold weather. She thus will lay from thirty to forty thousand or more in a year. Apiarians do not state whether the same queen heads another swarm on the following year, which perhaps she does in those cases of excessive fertility where her abundance is estimated at one hundred thousand, when by her sole individual capacity she populates three hives. In the more usual and ordinary case of her teeming with about seventy thousand, or fewer, she evidently heads but one swarm. With the described rapidity of the production of the cells, although the majority are store cells and not brood cells, conjunctively with her prolific laying, the population of the hive rapidly increases, which, added to the large original colony, will enable it in a propitious year to throw off a swarm of its own; but ordinarily she does not again lay drone eggs and royal eggs until the following season. The period at which to do this is taught her by the condition of the hive, as urgent for relief to its oppressive population by an exodus. The drone eggs are then laid, and are speedily succeeded by the laying of the royal eggs, so that the males of the season and the new queens may be hatched almost simultaneously, the drones slightly preceding the development of the queens. As soon as the egg of a worker is hatched, which, by means of the high temperature, is effected in four days after the laying, it, from its birth, is sedulously attended by the bees called nurse-bees. The little vermicle is very voracious and is heedfully supplied by these careful attendants,