The difficulty is further complicated by the fact that this change of nature does not take place until relatively late in the life of the bee. The egg is three days in hatching. But the young larva is at least three more days old before nature has made the irrevocable step along either of the divergent ways. For the experiment of transposition can be made with exactly the same result if undertaken with female bee-larvæ not more than three days old, instead of the unhatched eggs. Indeed, this is an operation that the nurse-bees themselves perform, on occasion. If a hive loses its queen, and it happens that all the eggs in the worker-cells are hatched out, the bees will breed another queen from any one of the worker-larva available. This is generally successful when the young grub has not passed the three days’ limit. But, even when all the larvæ of the hive are older than this, the bees will still attempt the task, knowing well that, without a queen, the colony must perish. In this case, however, the resulting queen will be defective in various ways. Probably she will never be capable of fertilisation, and therefore the breed of worker-bees will be cut off at its source. Unless the bee-master supplies the colony with a new queen, properly fecundated, the hive will gradually fill up with drones, the old worker-bees will die off, and the stock must ultimately become extinct. When once the study of the inner life of the honey-bee has been undertaken, the watcher will soon realise that he has embarked on a stranger voyage than he ever contemplated, even in his most daring moments. In the old bee-garden there was a serenity, a quiet enduring bliss of ignorance, that chimed in well with his slothful, holiday mood. The sunshine, the flowers, the song of the wind in the tree-tops, and the drowsy song of the hives; the voice of the old white-headed cottager weaving in his listener’s ear the old, comfortable arabesque of error; the sudden, jubilant uproar of a swarm, filling the blue sky with music and the flash of unnumbered wings; the night-quiet, with its deep underground bee-murmur, its dim half-moon peering over the hill-top, the shadowy bent figure of the old beeman listening at hive-doors for the battle-cry of rival queens, that should mean trouble on the morrow—it all comes back to the watcher now as a haven he has left inconsiderately, for a voyage over unknown, stormy seas. For now, with the inner life of the hive going on unmasked before his very eyes, wonder succeeds wonder almost without a break; and each new fact that reveals itself is more perturbing, because more destructive of old, hallowed convention, than any that has gone before.