344 THE INSECT WORLD. 
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 lives 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 mhabitants. 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 larvee of working bees of less 
than three days old, the nurses (as we have already said) adopt 
some of these larvee, and make them into queens by means of the 
physical education and the special nourishment which they give 
them. In this case, then, the evil can be repaired; the workers 
themselves find a remedy without assistance. But if the hive 
possesses a degenerate queen, which only lays male eggs, the in- 
tervention of man is necessary to save it, by the substitution of a 
properly impregnated queen. If, indeed, a strange queen wished 
to penetrate alone into a hive already containing a sovereign, she 
would infallibly be stopped at the door and stifled by the sentinels 
who guard the entrance to the hive. These would surround her 
immediately, and keep her captive under them till she perished, 
either through suffocation or hunger. They do not employ their 
stings against an intruding queen, except in the case of an attempt 
