'Yes.'
'And that this queen lays all the eggs?'
'Yes, dear. That much I know.'
'All right. Now the queen can act
ually lay two different kinds of eggs. You didn't know that, but she can. It's what we call one of the miracles of the hive. She can lay eggs that produce drones, and she can lay eggs that produce workers. Now if that isn't a miracle, Mabel, I don't know what is.'
'Yes, Albert, all right.'
'The drones are the males. We don't have to worry about them. The workers are all females. So is the queen, of course. But the workers are unsexed females, if you see what I mean. Their organs are completely undeveloped, whereas the queen is tremendously sexy. She can actually lay her own weight in eggs in a single day.'
He hesitated, marshalling his thoughts.
'Now what happens is this. The queen crawls around on the comb and lays her eggs in what we call cells. You know all those hundreds of little holes you see in a honeycomb? Well, a brood comb is just about the same except the cells don't have honey in them, they have eggs. She lays one egg to each cell, and in three days each of these eggs hatches out into a tiny grub. We call it a larva.
'Now, as soon as this larva appears, the nurse bees - they're young workers - all crowd round and start feeding it like mad. And you know what they feed it on?'
'Royal jelly,' Mabel answered patiently.
'Right!' he cried. 'That's exactly what they do feed it on. They get this stuff out of a gland in their heads and they start pumping it into the cell to feed the larva. And what happens then?'
He paused dramatically, blinking at her with his small watery-grey eyes. Then he turned slowly in his chair and reached for the magazine that he had been reading the night before.
'You want to know what happens then?' he asked, wetting his lips.
'I can hardly wait.'
' "Royal jelly," ' he read aloud, ' "must be a substance of tremendous nourishing power, for on this diet alone, the honeybee larva increases in weight fifteen hundred times in five days!" '
'How much?'
'Fifteen hundred times, Mabel. And you know what that means if you put it in terms of a human being? It means,' he said, lowering his voice, leaning forward, fixing her with those small pale eyes, 'it means that in five days a baby weighing seven and a half pounds to start off with would increase in weight to five tons!'
For the second time, Mrs Taylor stopped knitting.
'Now you mustn't take that too literally, Mabel.'
'Who says I mustn't?'
'It's just a scientific way of putting it, that's all.'
'Very well, Albert. Go on.'
'But that's only half the story,' he said. 'There's more to come. The really amazing thing about royal jelly, I haven't told you yet. I'm going to show you now how it can transform a plain dull-looking little worker bee with practically no sex organs at all into a great big beautiful fertile queen.'
'Are you saying our baby is dull-looking and plain?' she asked sharply.
'Now don't go putting words into my mouth, Mabel, please. Just listen to this. Did you know that the queen bee and the worker bee, although they are completely different when they grow up, are both hatched out of exactly the same kind of egg?'
'I don't believe that,' she said.
'It's true as I'm sitting here, Mabel, honest it is. Any time the bees want a queen to hatch out of the egg instead of a worker, they can do it.'
'How?'
'Ah,' he said, shaking a thick forefinger in her direction. 'That's just what I'm coming to. That's the secret of the whole thing. Now - what do you think it is, Mabel, that makes this miracle happen?'