My reader will be surprised that these queens, whose feoundation has been retarded, and whose fecundity is so useless to the bees, nevertheless should be so welcome and should become as dear to them as the females that lay eggs of both kinds; but I remember observing a fact more astonishing still. I saw workers bestow every attention on their queen though sterile, and after her death treat her dead body as they had treated her when alive, and long prefer this inanimate body to the most fertile queens that I offered them. This sentiment, which assumes the appearance of so lively an affection, is probably the effect of some agreeable sensation communicated by the queen to the bees, independent of their fertility. The queens which lay only male eggs doubtless excite the same sensation in the workers. While recalling this last observation, I remembered a statement of Swammerdam: this celebrated author stated, somewhere, that when a queen is blind, sterile, or mutilated, she ceases to lay and the workers of the hive no longer gather any crop or do any work, as if they knew that in such a case, it is useless to labor; but in advancing this fact, he does not cite the experiments which caused him to discover it; those made by myself have given me some very curious results. I several times amputed the four wings of queens, and after this mutilation, not only did they continue to lay, but the workers showed them no less consideration than before. Swammerdam therefore has no foundation for saying that mutilated queens cease to lay; indeed in his ignorance of the necessity of feoundation outside of the hive, it is possible that he cut the wings off virgin queens, and that they, becoming incapable of flight, remained barren from inability to seek the males in the air. The amputation of their wings does not render them sterile, if they were feecundated before losing them. We frequently cut off one of the antennae to recognize a queen more readily, and this was not prejudicial, either to her fecundity or her instinet, nor to the attention paid to her by the bees; it is true that, as one antennae still remained, the mutilation was imperfect, and this experiment decided nothing. But the amputation of both antennae produced most singular results. On the 5th of September of this year, I caused to be cut off both of the antennae of that same queen which laid only male eggs, and replaced her in the hive immediately after the operation: from that time, there was great alteration in her manner. We saw her travel over the combs with extraordinary vivacity; scarcely had the workers time to separate and recede before her: she dropped her eggs haphazard, without thinking of depositing them in any cells. As the hive was not very populous, a part of it was without combs; it was there that she repaired; she remained long motionless and appeared to avoid the bees; however a few workers followed her in this solitude, and treated her with most evident respect, seldom did she ask for honey; but when she did, she directed her trunk only with an uncertain groping, sometimes upon the legs and sometimes upon the heads of the workers, and when it reached their mouths it was by chance. At other times she returned upon the combs, then quitted them to run upon the glass sides of the hive, and in all her various motions she still dropped her eggs. At other times she appeared tormented with the desire of leaving her habitation, rushing towards the entrance, she entered the glass tube adapted to it, but the external orifice of this tube being too small for her passage, after useless efforts she returned; notwithstanding these symptoms of delirium, the bees did not cease to render her the same attention as they ever pay to their queens, but she received it with indifference. All the symptoms just described appeared to me as the effect of the amputation of the antenna;however, her organization having already suffered from retarded feeundation and as I had observed a sort of weakening in her instinct, the two causes might possibly concur in operating the same effect. To distinguish what particularly belonged to the deprivation of the antennae, it was necessary to repeat the experiment upon a queen otherwise well organized, and capable of laying both kinds of eggs.