TIII-: i:!-:;-: NATION. 215 



poisoned stings, or, after they have weakened them by 

 hunger, throw them out of the hive, and they perish the 

 next cool night from cold and hunger so that in the autumn 

 and late summer masses of dead drones are often found 

 lying in front of the beehives. The drones' cells are then 

 torn down, and the chance drones' eggs and pupae found 

 therein are thrown out ; nothing is left alive which recalls 

 idleness and sloth. Any drones which have escaped 

 slaughter on the first day in their own hives, are sought out 

 and massacred on the following. There can be no doubt as 

 to the special ground of this murderous onslaught. The 

 industrious working bees know that during the long winter 

 season the drones, as unproductive consumers, can only 

 hinder the life and well-being of the hive, without being of 

 the smallest use to it, the queen already having been long 

 fertilised. They therefore kill them, obeying the well-known 

 maxim : " He that will not work, neither shall he eat." O 

 shortsighted reason of the bees ! Did ye know that among 

 men those generally eat most and best who work least or not 

 at all, ye would perhaps act more wisely ! 



That the massacre of the drones is not performed entirely 

 from an instinctive impulse, but in full consciousness of the 

 object to be gained, is proved by the circumstance that it is 

 carried out the more completely and mercilessly the more 

 fertile the queen shows herself to be. But in cases when 

 this fertility is subject to serious doubt, or when the queen 

 has been fertilised too late or not at all, and therefore only 

 lays drones' eggs, or when the queen is barren, and new 

 queens, to be fertilised later, have to be brought up from 

 working-bee larvae, then all or some of the drones are left 

 alive, in the clear prevision that their services will be 

 required later. In such hives living drones are often found 

 all through the winter and even in the spring, and this is 

 otherwise exceptional. The foresight and prudence of the 

 workers is so great that in the first year of the foundation 

 of a new colony they do not permit its queen, whose single 

 impregnation suffices, as a rule, for many years, to lay 

 drones' eggs, for they build no drones' cells which owing to 

 the larger bodies of the drones have to be larger and wider 

 than those of the ordinary working-bees and they either 

 make the queen, who is able to lay one or other kind of 

 eggs as she will, understand that she must only lay fertilised 



