INHABITANTS OF THE HIVE. 89 



known that the queen is thus the one mother bee of 

 the hive. Virgil, amongst his many strange mistakes, 

 speaks of her, not as a female at all, but as a king ; 

 and, when he describes the battle of the bees, speaks 

 of two kings leading forth their hosts to war, .and 

 themselves joining in the fight. 



' With mighty souls in narrow bodies prest. 

 They challenge and encounter breast to breast. 

 So fixed on fame, unknowing how to fly. 

 And ultimately bent to win or die ; 

 That long the dreadful combat they maintain 

 'Till one prevails, for one alone can reign.' 



And, more or less, this mistake as to the queen's 

 sex continued to the time of Shakspeare, who, about 

 three hundred years ago, wrote of bees, — 

 ' They ha\c a king, and officers of state' 



This error is the more strange, because long before 

 Virgil's time, the truth was known to some. Aristotle, 

 who lived even three hundred years before Virgil, 

 writing of bees, tells us : ' Some say that the rulers 

 produce the young of the bees.' And again : ' There 

 are two kinds of rulers ; the best of them is red, the 

 other black ; their size is double that of the working 

 bees. By some they are called the " mother bees," as 

 if they were the parents of the rest.' 



And in the time of Shakspeare, Dr. Butler, one of 

 the first English writers on the subject, had some 

 knowledge of the truthj although liis idea was that 

 the queen only laid eggs producing queens, and that 

 the workers — known to him as females — laid all the 

 other eggs. The full truth, indeed, was hardly known 

 until the time of Huber. 



