The function of the queen is simply to lay eggs, and thus keep the colony populous; and this she does with an energy that is fairly startling. A good queen in her best estate will lay two or three thousand eggs a day. I have seen a queen in my observing hive, lay for some time at the rate of four eggs per minute, and have proved by actual computation of brood cells, that a queen may lay over three thousand eggs in a day. Langstroth and Berlepsch both saw queens lay at the rate of six eggs a minute. The latter had a queen that laid three thousand and twenty-one eggs in 24 hours, by actual count, and in 20 days she laid fifty-seven thousand. This queen continued prolific for five years, and must have laid, says the Baron, at a low estimate, more than 1,300,000 eggs. Dzierzon says queens may lay 1,000,000 eggs, and I think these authors have not exaggerated. Yet, with even these figures as an advertisement, the queen bee cannot boast of superlative fecundity, as the queen white-ant--an insect closely related to the bees in habits, though not in structure, as the white-ants are lace-wings and belong to the sub-order Neuroptera, which includes our day-flies, dragon-flies, etc.--is known to lay over 80,000 eggs daily. Yet this poor helpless thing, whose abdomen is the size of a man's thumb, and composed almost wholly of eggs, while the rest of her body is not larger than the same in our common ants, has no other amusement; she cannot walk; she cannot even feed herself or care for her eggs. What wonder then that she should attempt big things in the way of egg-laying? She has nothing else to do, or to feel proud of. Different queens vary as much in fecundity as do different breeds of fowls. Some queens are so prolific that they fairly demand hives of India rubber to accommodate them, keeping their hives gushing with bees and profitable activity while others are so inferior, that the colonies make a poor, sickly effort to survive at all, and usually succumb early, before those adverse circumstances which are ever waiting to confront all life on the globe. The activity of the queen, too, is governed largely by the activity of the workers. The queen will either lay sparingly, or stop altogether, in the interims of storing honey, while, on the other hand, she is stimulated to lay to her utmost capacity, when all is life and activity in the hive. It would seem that the queen either reasons from conditions, is taught by instinct, or else that without her volition the general activity of the worker-bees stimulates the ovaries, how, we know not, to grow more eggs. We know that such a stimulus is born of desire, in case of the high-holder, already referred to. That the queen may have control of the activity of her ovaries, either directly or indirectly, through reflex nervous action induced by the general excitement of the bees, which always follows active storing, is not only possible, but quite likely.