344 THE INSECT WORLD. 



their mission is over. By an inexorable law of nature they must 

 be got rid of, and the working bees proceed to make general mas- 

 sacre of them. It is in the months of July and August that this 

 frightful carnage takes place. The workers may then be seen 

 furiously giving chase to the males, and pursuing them to the ex- 

 tremity of the hive, where these unfortunate insects seek a place of 

 safety. Three or four workers dash off in the pursuit after a male. 

 They seize hold of him, pull him by his legs, by his wings, by his 

 antennae, and kill him with their stings. This pitiless massacre 

 includes even the larvae and pupae of the males. The executioners 

 drag them from their cells, run them through with their stings, 

 greedily suck the liquids contained in their bodies, and then 

 cast their remains to the winds. This slaughter goes on for many 

 days, continuing till the males have been completely got rid of, 

 they not being able to defend themselves, as they have no stings. 



They are allowed to live, however, when they are fortunate 

 enough to inhabit a hive deprived of its queen. There they even 

 find a place of perfect safety when they have been driven out of 

 another hive, and may be met with in this refuge until the 

 month of January. In like manner the live.s of the males are 

 spared in those hives which, instead of a true queen, have only a 

 female half impregnated, which lays only male eggs ; but a hive 

 of this kind, whose active population cannot be increased, ends 

 by being abandoned by its inhabitants. The sterility or absence 

 of the queen entails the dissolution of the society. She is, in fact, 

 the life and soul of the hive, and without her there is no hope, no 

 courage, no activity. The populace, abandoned to itself, falls into 

 anarchy. Famine, pillage, ruin, and death are at its doors. 

 Having no progeny to set their hopes on, the bees live from one 

 day to another without a care for the morrow. They leave off 

 working, and live entirely on theft and rapine, and at last they 

 disappear entirely. It is a society become rotten and broken up 

 for the want of a moral tie. 



If the loss of the mother bee takes place at a period at which 

 there still exist in the hive some larvae of working bees of 

 less than three days old, the nurses (as we have already said) 

 adopt some of these larvae, and make them into queens by means 

 of the physical education and the special nourishment which 



