href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@43577@[email protected]#Footnote_43_43" class="fnanchor pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">[43], suited to their size, the entrances to which are only large enough to admit themselves and the neuters, but much too small for the royal pair to pass through;—so that their state of royalty is a state of confinement, and so continues during the remainder of their existence. The impregnation of the female is supposed to take place after this confinement, and she soon begins to furnish the infant colony with new inhabitants. The care of feeding her and her male companion devolves upon the industrious larvæ, who supply them both with every thing that they want. As she increases in dimensions, they keep enlarging the cell in which she is detained. When the business of oviposition commences, they take the eggs from the female, and deposit them in the nurseries[44]. Her abdomen now begins gradually to extend, till in process of time it is enlarged to 1500 or 2000 times the size of the rest of her body, and her bulk equals that of 20,000 or 30,000 workers. This part, often more than three inches in length, is now a vast matrix of eggs, which make long circumvolutions through numberless slender serpentine vessels:—it is also remarkable for its peristaltic motion, (in this resembling the female ant[45],) which, like the undulations of water, produces a perpetual and successive rise and fall over the whole surface of the abdomen, and occasions a constant extrusion of the eggs, amounting sometimes in old females to sixty in a minute, or eighty thousand and upwards in twenty-four hours[46]. As these females live two years in their perfect state, how astonishing must be the number produced in that time!