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pollen; his tongue is even shorter than that of the queen; 
and he has no sting. An examination of his structure will 
show that he is specialised for rapid, powerful, and long- 
continued flight. He has a great spread of wing, a highly 
developed thorax to accommodate the great muscles that 
work the wings, a spacious abdomen to ensure the supply of 
oxygen necessary for rapid motion, a magnificent pair of 
eyes so that he may detect from afar that small dark object, 
which is the queen in flight. His legs are relatively weak, 
because they are never in use except inside the hive, and for 
a few steps on the alighting board on entering and departing. 
The function of the drone is to be on the wing every fine 
day during the sunny hours, when young queens are likely 
to come forth for mating purposes. This is the only duty 
for which drones are fitted, and this they perform with the 
‘utmost diligence, their whole time outside the hive being 
spent in active flight. Their life is indeed strenuous, although 
the drone has been called lazy by those who apparently 
expect him to do what he cannot possibly do, namely, gather 
honey and pollen like the worker. To compare a lazy man 
to a drone is therefore an injustice—to the drone. 
At the end of the honey harvest, every “queen-right” 
stock of bees drives forth its drones to perish of cold and 
want. But the drones may be destroyed at any time if the 
stock comes within sight of starvation. First the adult 
drones are expelled, next the drone brood is pulled out 
of the cells, then the worker brood is sacrificed, and finally 
the old worker bees begin to die of starvation. The bee- 
keeper who sees the drones being killed out of season 
should take prompt measures to supply food to the stock. 
When the hive does not contain a fertile queen, the drones 
will be allowed to live until very late in the season, or even 
until the following spring, and the presence of drones in a 
particular stock at a time when most drones have been killed 
off indicates that there must be something wrong with 
the queen. 
