INTRODUCTION xix 



queen-bee is the most willing, and, at certain 

 seasons, the most laborious slave of them all. 



It is useless to deny that bee-polity, with its 

 stern dead-reckoning of ingenuity, its merciless 

 adherence to the demands of a system perfected 

 through countless ages, has its unpleasant and 

 even its revolting aspects. Nature is always 

 wonderful, but not always admirable ; and a close 

 study of the Life within the Hive brings out this 

 truth perhaps more clearly than with any other 

 form of life, humanity not excepted. Absolute 

 communism implies incidental cruelty : it is only 

 under a system of bland political compromise, of 

 neighbourly give and take, that justice and mercy 

 can ever be yoke- fellows. In the republic of bees, 

 nothing is allowed to persist that is harmful or 

 useless to the general good. Every individual in 

 the hive seems to acquiesce in this common 

 principle — either by choice or compulsion — from 

 the mother-bee down to the last lazy drone, born 

 into the brief plenty of waning summer days. In 

 the height of the honey-flow, the State demands a 

 storehouse filled to the brim ; and every bee keeps 

 herself to the task unceasingly until death from 

 overwork comes upon her, and her last load never 

 reaches the hive. If the queen-bee grows old, or 

 her powers of egg-laying prematurely fail, she is 



