196 A TOUn ROUND MY GAEDEH 



themselves comfortably installed, they remain willingly, and, 

 on the morrow commence their labours. If, by chance, a 

 part only of the swarm has been taken, and the q^ueen is not 

 among the captives, none of the bees wiU work j there will be 

 neither wax nor honey made in the hive. The motive which 

 gives such ardour to the workers, is the certainty of having 

 among them a fruitful mother, whose young family it is their 

 duty to feed and bring up. 



In general, the di-ones have remained, if not all, almost all, 

 in the old hive. The other queens are massacred, and their 

 bodies dragged out. It sometimes happens that at the 

 moment of the coming out of the swarm, two young mothers 

 at once pretend to the sovereignty of the new colony. In 

 fact, sometimes twenty of them are born in a single hive. If 

 two queens come out at the same time, the swarm divides, 

 but unequally; each of the two queens establishes herself 

 and her partisans upon a different branch. 



Our young laureate told us, according to Virgil, what was 

 formerly thought of these two hings. If one were the model 

 of all the virtues, the other was but a brazen-faced scoundrel. 

 The first was covered with gold ; the second, shabbily drest, 

 and had a great belly. 



Another more modern author who has written upon bees, 

 in French, expresses himself in analogous terms. He calls 

 the false king the tyrant. 



" His dismal colour, his great belly, his rough legs, and his 

 languid gestures, are signs of envy, avarice, ambition, glut- 

 tony, cowardice, idleness," &c. &c. 



Certainly, never was monarch so ill-treated ; the tyrants of 

 tragedy are, beyond contradiction, the most patient and the 

 most meek of men. Every character in the piece spouts hig 

 two hundred verses of invectives against them without inters 

 ruption ; and if one of the tyrants stops them by crying out, 

 "Hola! my guards!" it is not tiU the other has exhausted 

 his vocabulary, without cutting off one hemistich or misplacing 

 one rhyme. This poor tyrant of the bees is not much better 

 dealt with. It is a fortunate thing for him that the writer 

 did not know that Beelzebub means king of the flies; he 

 certainly would not have spared him that name. But this is 

 not all: " The tyrant comes out of the hive, and gets away 



