In many species the queen swells into a monstrous egg-laying machine whose abdomen has swollen over a thousand times into a giant waxy off-white sausage around ten centimetres long. Her head, thorax and legs remain tiny and can only flail about pathetically, since all other movement is restrained by her grotesque, pulsating girth. She must be fed and her gargantuan maggot-like body cleaned by a legion of workers, allowing her to spend every bit of her energy squeezing out a fresh egg every three or so seconds, all day every day, for up to twenty years.
