The Swarm 



a queen; nor will a queen ever draw hers 

 on a man, an animal, or an ordinary bee. 

 She will never unsheath her royal weapon 

 — curved, in scimeter fashion, instead of 

 being straight, like that of the ordinary 

 bee — save only in the case of her doing 

 battle with an equal : in other words, 

 with a sister queen. 



No bee, it would seem, dare take on 

 herself the horror of direct and bloody 

 regicide. Whenever, therefore, the good 

 order and prosperity of the republic 

 appear to demand that a queen shall die, 

 they endeavour to give to her death some 

 semblance of natural decease, and by infi- 

 nite subdivision of the crime, to render it 

 almost anonymous. 



They will, therefore, to use the pictur- 

 esque expression of the apiarist, " ball " 

 the queenly intruder ; in other words, they 

 will entirely surround her with their innu- 

 merable interlaced bodies. They will 



lOI 



