A curious circumstance occurs with respect to the hatching of the queen-bee. When the pupa or nymph is about to change into the perfect insect, the bees render the cover of the cell thinner, by gnawing away part of the wax; and with so much nicety do they perform this operation that the cover at last becomes pellucid, owing to its extreme thinness, thus facilitating the exit of the fly. After the transformation is complete, the young queens would, in common course, immediately emerge from their cells, as workers and drones do; but the former always keep the royal infants prisoners for some days, supplying them in the mean time with honey for food, a small hole being made in the door of each cell, through which the confined bee extends its proboscis to receive it. The _royal prisoners_ continually utter a kind of song, the modulations of which are said to vary. _Vide_ Chapter XV. Huber heard a young princess in her cell emit a very distinct sound or clacking, consisting of several monotonous notes in rapid succession, and he supposes the working bees to ascertain, by the loudness of these tones, the ripeness of their queens. Huber has suggested that the cause of this temporary imprisonment may possibly be to enable the young queens to fly away at the instant they are liberated. The queen is a good deal harassed by the other bees, on her liberation. This has been attributed to their wishing to impel her to go off with a swarm as soon as possible, but this notion is probably erroneous; it certainly is so if Huber be correct, in saying that the swarms are always accompanied by the older queens. The queen has the power of instantly putting a stop to their worrying, by uttering a peculiar noise, which has been called the _voice of sovereignty_. Bonner however declares that he never could observe in the queen anything like an exercise of sovereignty. But Huber's statement was not founded upon a solitary instance; he heard the sound on various occasions, and witnessed the striking effect which it always produced. On one occasion, a queen having escaped the vigilance of her guards and sprung from the cell, was, on her approach to the royal embryos, pulled, bitten and chased by the other bees. But standing with her thorax against a comb and crossing her wings upon her back, keeping them in motion, but not unfolding them, she emitted a particular sound, when the bees became, as it were, paralysed and remained motionless. Taking advantage of this dread, she rushed to the royal cells; but the sound having ceased as she prepared to ascend, the guardians of the cells instantly took courage and fairly drove her away. This voice of sovereignty, as it has been called, resembles that which is made by young queens before they are liberated from their cells; it is a very distinct kind of clicking, composed of many notes in the same key, which follow each other rapidly. The sound accompanied by the