134 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 



using the last pulsations of her worn-out, ragged 

 wings to carry her away to the traditional burial- 

 place of the hive ; or her end may be to fall under 

 the stroke of the State executioners. For the 

 old-age problem has long ago discovered its 

 effective solution in the bee-republic. Justice 

 that is capable of being tempered with mercy 

 carries its own mark of imperfection indelibly 

 upon it. When the principle of all for the common 

 good has been driven to its last resort in logic, 

 mercy to the individual can only be another name 

 for robbing Peter to pay Paul. In bee-communism 

 the sole title to life is utility, and so the old worn- 

 out, useless workers must go. 



The development of the worker-egg through 

 its various stages of growth, until the perfectly 

 formed insect emerges from the cell, makes a 

 curious study. The egg itself is remarkable, for 

 it is covered with an hexagonal pattern. The 

 large compound eyes of the fully grown bee also 

 show this form. Each eye consists of about four 

 thousand separate lenses, and each lens is a regular 

 hexagon. Wonder has often been expressed at 

 the ingenuity of the comb-builders in making the 

 cells six-sided, and thus crowding into a given 

 space more compartments than could be secured 

 by the same amount of material wrought into any 

 other shape. The ancient writers explained this 

 choice of the hexagonal cell by the supposed fact 

 that the six legs of the bee were simultaneously 



