Tales of the Unexpected

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?’
    ‘Royal jelly,’ she answered. ‘You already told me.’
    ‘Royal jelly it is!’ he cried, clapping his hands and bouncing up on his seat. His big round face was glowing with excitement now, and two vivid patches of scarlet had appeared high up on each cheek.
    ‘Here’s how it works. I’ll put it very simply for you. The bees want a new queen. So they build an extra-large cell, a queen cell we call it, and they get the old queen to lay one of her eggs in there. The other one thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine eggs she lays in ordinary worker cells. Now. As soon as these eggs hatch into larvae, the nurse bees rally round and start pumping in the royal jelly. All of them get it, workers as well as queen. But here’s the vital thing, Mabel, so listen carefully. Here’s where the difference comes. The worker larvae only receive this special marvellous food for the
first three days
of their larval life. After that they have a complete change of diet. What really happens is they get weaned, except that it’s not like an ordinary weaning because it’s so sudden. After the third day they’re put straight away on to more or less routine bees’ food – a mixture of honey and pollen – and then about two weeks later they emerge from the cells as workers.
    ‘But not so the larva in the queen cell! This one gets royal jelly
all the way through its larval life
. The nurse bees simply pour it into the cell, so much so in fact that the little larva is literally floating in it. And that’s what makes it into a queen!’
    ‘You can’t prove it,’ she said.
    ‘Don’t talk so damn silly, Mabel, please. Thousands of people have proved it time and time again, famous scientists in every country in the world. All you have to do is to take a larva out of a worker cell and put it in a queen cell – that’s what we call grafting – and just so long as the nurse bees keep it well supplied with royal jelly, then presto! – it’ll grow up into a queen! And what makes it more marvellous still is the absolutely enormous difference between a queen and a worker when they grow up. The abdomen is a different shape. The sting is different. The legs are different. The…’
    ‘In what way are the legs different?’ she asked, testing him.
    ‘The legs? Well, the workers have little pollen baskets on their legs for carrying the pollen. The queen has none. Now here’s another thing. The queen has fully developed sex organs. The workers don’t. And most amazing of all, Mabel, the queen lives for an average of four to six years. The worker hardly lives that many months. And all this difference simply because one of them got royal jelly and the other didn’t!’
    ‘It’s pretty hard to believe,’ she said, ‘that a food can do all that.’
    ‘Of course it’s hard to believe. It’s another of the miracles of the hive. In fact it’s the biggest ruddy miracle of them all. It’s such a hell of a big miracle that it’s baffled the greatest men of science for hundreds of years. Wait a moment. Stay there. Don’t move.’
    Again he jumped up and went over to the bookcase and started rummaging among the books and magazines.
    ‘I’m going to find you a few of the reports. Here we are. Here’s one of them. Listen to this.’ He started reading aloud from a copy of the
American Bee Journal
:
    ‘ “Living in Toronto at the head of a fine research laboratory given to him by the people of Canada in