102 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 



difference, the queen possessing only four abdominal 

 ganglia, while the worker has five. The queen's 

 sting is curved, and longer than the worker's : the 

 sting of the worker-bee is perfectly straight. On 

 their hind-legs the workers have a curious con- 

 trivance which bee-keepers have named the pollen- 

 basket. It is a hollowing of the thigh, the cavity 

 being surrounded with stiff hairs ; and within this 

 the pollen is packed and carried home to the hive. 

 In the queen both the cavity and the hairs are 

 absent. Her colour also is generally different 

 from that of the worker-bee, her legs, in particular, 

 being a much redder brown. 



Here is a problem for our great biologists — a 

 problem, however, at which the plain, every-day 

 man may well flinch. For we seem to have come 

 face to face with new principles of organic life, 

 facts incompatible with the accepted ideas of the 

 inevitable relation between cause and effect. The 

 irresistible tendency at this stage is to hark back ; 

 to repeat the experiment of the transposed eggs, 

 and see whether no vital, initial circumstance has 

 been overlooked. But the result is always the 

 same. Nor can the most careful microscopical 

 dissection of the eggs themselves reveal any differ- 

 ences. In this mystery of the structural variance 

 between queen and worker, it would seem that we 

 are forced to accept one of three alternatives. 

 Either the egg contains two distinct germs of life, 

 one developing only under the stress of hard times. 



