74 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 



is held in abeyance. This big lusty drone, with 

 exuberant masculinity obvious in every posture 

 and act ; his totally different organism ; his in- 

 capacity for anything else than the fulfilment of the 

 one office required of him, for he cannot even 

 entirely feed himself; his habit of spending his 

 life either in a comfortable lethargy of repletion 

 at home, or in amorous knight-errantry abroad — 

 this drone might have been a little plodding 

 worker- bee, with shrunken yet elaborated body 

 and curiously developed brain, whose one idea in 

 life is to get through the largest amount of work 

 before death claims her, and who is armed with 

 a formidable poisoned sting, while the drone has 

 none. 



It is useless at this stage to tell the learner that 

 all these vital differences — miracles, indeed, in the 

 ordinary meaning of the word — are brought about 

 by the leading powers of the hive in certain simple, 

 easily explainable ways. He has lost, for the 

 moment, all sight of and interest in the details, 

 however extraordinary, in the perception that has 

 dawned on him of the vastness of the entire plan. 

 Here is a community that, to all appearances, has 

 solved every problem relating to the well-being 

 and progress of a crowded, highly organised 

 society. Questions that are now vexing socialistic 

 philosophers in the human world, or are looming 

 dark in the immediate future — problems of numerical 

 increase in relation to food-supply, the balance of 



