150 THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 
fit;.so that settles that. The worker in a hive is really the “new 
woman” of beedom, and she has given up her motherhood for a 
business career ; sometimes, though, she lays eggs, but they always 
hatch out drones, of whom it is strictly true to say they have a 
mother, but no father, for if the queen’s wings are crippled so that 
she cannot make her marriage flight her children are all drones, 
An Italian queen bee in a hive of black bees will produce work- 
ers of mixed blood, but her sons are pure Italians. 
Once when going a journey on the railway passing through a 
piece of bush pasture land near here, one of our relatives noticed a 
swarm of wasps clustering about the head and neck of a fine heifer 
that seemed to have aroused the wrath of the insects by inadvert- 
antly rubbing against a decayed hollow stump in which the wasps’ 
nest was situate. The bovine had evidently been goaded by the 
stings of the enraged wasp swarm to a state of temporary insanity, 
but the rapidly moving train afforded no opportunity of ascertaining 
what the denouement might be. 
On a somewhat similar occasion, whilst we were driving to the 
harvest field with a span of horses and wagon, one of the horses in 
stepping near to a stump happened to disturb some humbles bees 
which evidently had a nest just underground in the vicinity of the 
stump. Several of the bees buzzed angrily around the horse’s head 
and breast, and a few more bees seemed in a hurry to join in the 
fracas, and we were apprehensive of a runaway and smashup of our 
wagon ; but such a misfortune was probably prevented by the non- 
chalent or unexcitable temper of our equine team, and the animal 
first assailed vetoed the danger by promptly stamping a number of 
times in quick succession with his expansive hoofs of one of his 
forelegs on the hole in the ground whence the venemous flies were 
emerging from the honey stores! The underground occupants of 
the citadel must have had an experience similar to what might have 
been produced by the descent of an aerolite on their habitation. 
Men engaged in the work of mowing were sometimes unex- 
pectedly assailed by hornets whose nests, perhaps attached to the 
forks of some tall weed growing among the meadow grass, had been 
levelled by the operation of the scythe. One of our neighbors, in 
one of these escapades a few years ago, to avoid being stung by the 
buzzing swarm that sorrounded his features, fell to the ground, and 
