Another reason for her extended flight and its remarkable pace is that only the strongest and swiftest drone of all the pursuing multitude is likely to overtake her, and this again makes for the betterment of the race. Perhaps there is no parallel instance in nature where the selection of the fittest individuals to continue a species is so carefully provided for, and no doubt this accounts for the high place of the honey-bee in the scale of created things. But this scheme involves enormous risk to the young queen. A hundred dangers lurk on her path. She is a tempting morsel for every bird that throngs the air of the June morning. Her untried wings may fail her. Even if she gets back safely to the bee-garden, she may enter the wrong hive, to her instant destruction. But she must take her chance of all risks; and the only thing to do is to render her absence from home as brief as may be, and her fertilisation as sure, by making the wandering drone-population large enough to cover all probable ranges of flight. From the very first the drone is nurtured in a different way from the worker-bee. The egg is laid in a wider and deeper cell; and during its first three days of life the drone-larva is fed with bee-milk, probably of a special kind and certainly of more generous quantity. After the third day this chyle-food is reduced, as is the case with the worker-grub; but while the worker is then given only honey, it is certain that the drone-larva receives both honey and pollen, and that for a full day longer. In all, it takes about twenty-four or twenty-five days to produce the perfect drone-bee, as against an average twenty-one days for the worker. The queen-bee, as has been already seen, is developed in much less time than either, little more than a fortnight elapsing between the time the egg is laid and the time she is ready to gnaw her way out of the cell. After the drone is hatched, it will be another two weeks or so before he makes his first venture in the open air. All this time he has the free run of the larder, and steadily gorges himself on honey when he is not sleeping off the effects of his surfeit in some snug, out-of-the-way corner of the hive. But honey is not his only, or even his principal, food. Throughout his whole life he is constantly fed by the house-bees with the rich chyle-food given to him as a larva, and it has been proved that if this is withheld from him for the space of three days he will die of starvation, even in the midst of abundant honey. Thus the worker-bees have him completely in their power.