They select, when not more than three days old, an egg or grub previously intended for a worker-bee, and then enlarge the cell so selected by destroying the surrounding partitions; they thus form a royal cradle, in shape very much like an acorn cup inverted. The chosen embryo is then fed liberally with a peculiar description of nurture, called by naturalists "royal jelly"--a pungent food, prepared by the working bees exclusively for those of the larvæ that are destined to become candidates for the honour of royalty. Should a queen be forcibly separated from her subjects, she resents the interference, refuses food, pines, and dies. The whole natural history of the queen-bee is in itself a subject that will well repay for continuous study. Those who desire to follow it, we would refer to the complete works of Huber--the greatest of apiarians,--Swammerdam, Bevan, Langstroth, &c. The observations upon the queen-bee needful to verify the above mentioned facts can only be made in hives constructed for the purpose, of which our "Unicomb Observatory Hive" is one of the best. In ordinary hives the queen is scarcely ever to be seen; where there are several rows of comb, she invariably keeps between them, both for warmth and to be more secure from danger. The writer has frequently observed in stocks which have unfortunately died, that the queen was one of the last to expire; and she is always more difficult to gain possession of than other bees, being by instinct taught that she is indispensable to the welfare of her subjects. The queen enjoys a far longer life than any of her subjects, her age generally extending to four or even five years. The drones, which are mostly hatched in the early spring, seldom live more than three or four months, even if they should escape the sting of the executioner, to which they generally fall victims. The worker-bee, it is now a well-ascertained fact, lives from six to eight months, in no case exceeding the latter; so that we may reckon that the bees hatched in April and May expire about the end of the year, and it is those of the autumn who carry on the duties of the hive until the spring and summer, that being the time when the greatest number of eggs are laid. The population of a hive is very small during the winter, in comparison with the vast numbers gathering produce in the summer,--produce which they themselves live to enjoy but for a short period. So that not only, as of old, may lessons of industry be learned from bees, but they also teach self-denial to mankind, since they labour for the community rather than for themselves. Evans, in describing the age of bees, thus paraphrases the well known couplet of Homer in allusion to the fleeting generations of men:-- Like leaves on trees, the race of bees is found, Now green in youth, now withering on the ground; Another race the spring or fall supplies. They droop successive, and successive rise.