214 THE BEE NATION. 



Good as may be the treatment by the working bees of 

 their king, or rather their queen, that which they show 

 towards the lazy and defenceless husbands, the males or 

 so-called drones, is bad and even cruel. The queen-bee lives 

 in a married state which is also often found among mankind, 

 although rarer than its reverse, that known as polyandry. 

 Her male harem is larger than almost any female harem 

 among Orientals, for it consists of many six to eight 

 hundred drones, which play a generally useless part in the 

 bee state, for a single drone is enough to fertilise the queen, 

 and they neither work, nor, lacking the terrible poisoned 

 sting, can they protect and defend the State. They therefore 

 thoroughly represent a hereditary peerage, which lets itself 

 l>e served and fed by an industrious working class, without 

 directly contributing anything to the good of the community; 

 from May to August they lead an easy life, devoted to amuse- 

 ment, imtouched by care or toil. If, indeed, they could 

 foresee the woful fate which awaits them at the end of this 

 period, their bliss would be less untroubled. Their great 

 number which, as has been said, far exceeds real necessity 

 would be a thoroughly incomprehensible and puzzling fact 

 in the otherwise well-ordered bee State, if it were not to be 

 regarded as a legacy from the formerly wild and uncultivated 

 condition of the bees, in which each bee colony lived inde- 

 pendently, and partly because of this, partly because of the 

 many dangers threatening the drones on their flight, a very 

 great number of these was requisite for the secure attain- 

 ment of the object of their existence ; to-day, when as a 

 rule many hives stand close together, and the care and 

 providence of men ward off clangers, so large a number of 

 drones no longer seems necessary. 



This mistake of nature, however, is corrected, or set 

 right again by the prudent workers, which only put up with 

 and feed their idle brethren so long as they consider them 

 necessary for the impregnation of the queen. But in 

 autumn, or late summer, when the wedding flight is over and 

 when food is getting scarce, the famous massacre of the 

 drones takes place, in which the male aristocracy of the state 

 is offered up for the common good, without regard to close 

 family ties between them and the workers. The latter in 

 thousands surround the fat, lazy, defenceless creatures, drive 

 them together into a heap, and either pierce them with their 



