BOMBUS, THE HUMBLE-BEE 83 

 honey-bee. You feel that you might appeal to 

 the better feelings of Bombus, but that it were 

 useless to do so to Vespa or Apis. The queen, 

 again, has something of the mother in her. She 

 is not reduced to an egg-producing apparatus, 

 which lays eggs with the regularity and inevit- 

 ableness of a recurring decimal. The queen 

 humble-bee broods over her young, tends them 

 and feeds them. The workers work as hard as 

 any Apis, but they seem less self-conscious about 

 it, and the drones have the grace to provide dur- 

 ing their brief life for themselves. It is true 

 that the nest is more untidy, more littered than 

 the hive ; the domestic economy is Irish, not 

 Dutch, but after all, what would life be without 

 litter ? 



