173 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 



doubly sure, this thorough-minded amazon must 

 fill the haft of her triple blade with a subtle poison, 

 and so contrive its sliding mechanism that the 

 same impulse, which drives the points successively 

 forward, drenches the whole weapon with a fatal 

 juice. 



The tendency to be unduly scientific, to meet 

 these things with exact and unimaginative interest, 

 receives its final quietus here. For he who 

 realises the whole deadly efficacy of the honey- 

 bee's sting cannot logically pass it by as a mere 

 remarkable provision of nature, praising God for 

 it complacently, but must concede it a much wider 

 significance. This complicated weapon of the 

 stunted, sex-perverted worker-bee owes its exist- 

 ence as much to deliberate art as to nature, or 

 those who watch the Omnipotent in hive-life are 

 strangely and perversely led astray. In the queen- 

 mother, whose physical organism may be said to 

 be comparatively unchanged from its aboriginal 

 type, we see the part corresponding to the worker's 

 sting, essentially another creation. The queen's 

 ovipositor is longer ; it is curved ; the barbs upon 

 it are small and insignificant ; the fluid in the 

 secreting-gland is no poison at all, but a thick 

 opaque substance, whose true use is probably to 

 glue the eggs safely to the bottoms of the cells. 

 She is also provided with a pair of blunt instru- 

 ments covered with sensitive hairs, which serve, 

 with the ovipositor, to guide the egg securely to 



