THE DRONE AND HIS STORY 243 



in the air as a sort of protest against all this anxious 

 industry going on about him. Once gone from the 

 neighbourhood of the hive, he seems to keep in- 

 cessantly on the wing until hunger prompts him 

 home again. For no one has ever seen a drone- 

 bee among the insects that haunt the flowers, nor 

 ever seen him basking on a sunlit wall or tree- 

 trunk, after the kind of almost every other winged 

 atom in the universe. 



He comes back to the hive with the same noisy, 

 careless fanfaronade, and is received by the workers 

 with the same sullen indifference. They give him 

 his fill of bee-milk, linking tongues with him as he 

 sits up like an overgrown baby, voracious, clamour- 

 ing to be fed. They suffer him to swill at the 

 honey- stores unchecked, but plainly regard him 

 with contumely. He is a terrible expense to the 

 State, yet a necessary one. Silently they go about 

 their uncongenial business of nourishing him — 

 silently, and with an ominous patience. They 

 grudge him every drop, and, all the more, urge 

 him to his excesses. It is not for long. The day 

 of reckoning is near at hand. Already the poppies 

 glow scarlet on the hill — the poppies that mark the 

 turning-point of the summer ; and after them the 

 long decline, with its ever-diminishing sun-glow; 

 each day with a scantier meed of blossom, until 

 the path runs again into the dreary levels, the 

 sober greys and russets, of winter death. 



Now the worker-bee is to show a grizzly seam 

 16 2 



