BEE-MASTERS IN THE MIDDLE AGES 33 



Rusden was only echoing the belief immemorially 

 established among the beemen of the past. 



The single large bee, which all knew to exist in 

 each hive, was generally looked upon as the abso- 

 lute ruler of the community. It is variously 

 described as a king or queen by writers in the 

 sixteenth and seventeenth century, but only in the 

 sense of a governor ; and the word chosen largely 

 depended on the sex of the august person who 

 happened to occupy the English throne at the 

 time. Thus Rusden very wisely discarded the 

 notion of a queen-bee when he had to deal with 

 Charles the Second. Butler, perhaps the most 

 learned of the mediaeval writers on the honey-bee, 

 as astutely forbore to mention the word king, his 

 book being published in the reign of Queen Anne. 

 He calls it " The Feminine Monarchie," but seems 

 to have no more suspected the truth that the large 

 bee was really the mother of the whole colony 

 than any of his predecessors. Almost alone in his 

 day, however, he refuses to accept the flower 

 theory of bee-generation, and asserts that the 

 worker-bees and drones are the females and males 

 respectively. But, he says, they " engender not 

 as other living creatures ; onely they suffer their 

 Drones among them for a season, by whose Mascu- 

 line virtue they strangely conceive and breed for the 

 preservation of their sweet kinde." He gets over 

 the difficulty of there being no drones in the hive 

 for nine months in the year, during part of which 

 3 



