On the other hand, Sir John Lubbock never succeeded in keeping the males ‘alive longer than a few weeks.’ Both the older and more recent observers agree in stating that female ants, like queen bees, are always protected as completely as possible from injury and danger. Dr. A. Forel, whose thorough knowledge of Swiss ants is well known, writes to me,—‘The female ants are only once fertilized, and are then tended by the workers, being cleaned and fed in the middle of the nest: one often finds them with only three legs, and with their chitinous armour greatly worn. They never leave the centre of the nest, and their only duty is to lay eggs.’ With regard to the workers, Forel believes that their constitution would enable them to live as long as the females (as the experiments of Lubbock also indicate), and the fact that in the wild state they generally die sooner than the females is ‘certainly connected with the fact that they are exposed to far greater dangers.’ The same relation seems also to obtain among bees, but with them it has not been shown that in confinement the workers live as long as the queens. _Bees._ According to von Berlepsch[19] the queen may as an exception live for five years, but as a rule survives only two or three years. The workers always seem to live for a much shorter period, generally less than a year. Direct experiments upon isolated or confined bees, or upon marked individuals in the wild state, do not prove this, but the statistics obtained by bee-keepers confirm the above. Every winter the numbers in a hive diminish from 12,000-20,000 to 2000-3000. The queen lays the largest number of eggs in the spring, and the workers which die before the winter are replaced by those which emerge in the summer, autumn or during a mild winter. The queen lays eggs at such a variable rate throughout the year that the above-mentioned inequality in numbers is explained. The workers do not often live for more than six to seven months, and at the time of their greatest labour, (May to July), only three months. An attempt to calculate the length of life of the workers and drones by taking stock at the end of summer, gives six months for the former and four months for the latter[20]. The drones do not as a rule live so long as four months, for they meet with a violent death before the end of this period. The well-known slaughter of the drones is not, according to the latest observations, brought about directly by means of the stings of the workers, but by these latter driving away the useless drones from the food so that they perish of starvation.