THE DRONE AND HIS STORY 235 



denied that the communal life of the honey-bee is 

 a high civilisation ; that it has grown to be what 

 it is to-day through ages of necessity ; that the one 

 sex has the other under a complete and terrible 

 subjection, for which, and for the privilege of all 

 power, the dominant sex has paid a terrible price. 

 The worker-bee to-day is an over-intellectual, 

 neurotic, morbidly dutiful creature, while the drone 

 is admittedly nothing but a stupid, happy, sensual 

 lout. If the extreme difference between the sexes 

 in bee-life had been aboriginal, the relations of 

 drone and worker, as we see them in the hives 

 to-day, would be meet and reasonable enough ; 

 but there seems to be clear evidence that, far back 

 in the life of the race, the female bee was not so 

 hopelessly superior to her mate. The queen-bee, 

 in all likelihood, fairly represents the mother-bee 

 as she was before the cooling crust of the earth 

 made some sort of protected habitation necessary, 

 which led first to close clustering for mutual 

 warmth, and then gradually developed the com- 

 plicated hive-life of to-day. But evolution will 

 hardly account for all that we see: revolution 

 must have had its part in the production of the 

 modern self-unsexed worker. It has been seen 

 that there is no physiological reason why each 

 worker in the hive should not have grown into the 

 fertile mother of thousands. The workers are not 

 a stunted, specialised race, slowly evolved by time 

 and necessity, and procreating their own stunted 



