Permanent queenlessness is a calamity which affects different colonies in different ways. With some it means complete despair, a cessation of all enterprise or interest in life. Work is stopped; the guards are withdrawn from the gate; the community seems to give up in a body, and to await extinction with no more hope than a batch of criminals in the condemned cell. But with others the common disaster is but a signal for a universal quickening of wits, a furbishing-up of all possible and impossible resources. To bees of this temper we should look for such episodes as the egg-purloining to supply a queen-cell, which has been already dealt with. But for supreme ingenuity, even though it be the forlornest of forlorn hopes, perhaps there is nothing to equal a device sometimes resorted to in this last emergency. Looking through a hive which is not only without a queen, but which is without any means of raising one, certain mysterious eggs are unexpectedly discovered. These eggs are obviously quite newly laid, but not in the orthodox way. A normal queen works consistently from cell to cell, over a fairly regular patch of comb, and deposits only one egg in each cell; but these eggs in the queenless hive have been laid in a curiously haphazard way. The eggs are straggled over the comb. Two or three cells have been furnished at one spot and a few more at another, without the slightest attempt at the usual order and system. Moreover, some cells contain single eggs, but others two, or even three, apiece. It looks as if some demented mother-bee from another hive had caught her keepers napping, and had made surreptitious excursion into the queenless stock. But the most careful search through the hive will reveal no queen, nor is one to be found. The explanation of the vagary is that one of the workers has, in some extraordinary way, succeeded in rousing her atrophied nature, and has become capable of laying eggs. Yet the doom of the colony is not delayed by this, but rather hastened; for these eggs will produce only drones, and thus still more useless mouths to feed. In one well-authenticated case, the bees of a queenless colony built a queen-cell, and actually transplanted to it one of these eggs laid by a fertile worker, a dead drone being afterwards found in the cell. How the laying worker is produced under the spur of the national crisis can only be a matter for speculation, but probably the youngest bee of the colony is plied with the special food usually given to queens, and thus her generative faculties are, to a certain extent, developed. CHAPTER X A ROMANCE OF ANATOMY