INTRODUCTION xix 
queen-bee is the most willing, and, at certain 
seasons, the most laborious slave of them all. 
It is useless to deny that bee-polity, with its 
stern dead-reckoning of ingenuity, its merciless 
adherence to the demands of a system perfected 
through countless ages, has its unpleasant and 
even its revolting aspects. Nature is always 
wonderful, but not always admirable; and a close 
study of the Life within the Hive brings out this 
truth perhaps more clearly than with any other 
form of life, humanity not excepted. Absolute 
communism implies incidental cruelty: it is only 
under a system of bland political compromise, of 
neighbourly give and take, that justice and mercy 
can ever be yoke-fellows. In the republic of bees, 
nothing is allowed to persist that is harmful or 
useless to the general good. Every individual in 
the hive seems to acquiesce in this common 
principle—either by choice or conipulsion—from 
the mother-bee down to the last lazy drone, born 
into the brief plenty of waning summer days. In 
the height of the honey-flow, the State demands a 
storehouse filled to the brim ; and every bee keeps 
herself to the task unceasingly until death from 
overwork comes upon her, and her last load never 
reaches the hive. If the queen-bee grows old, or 
her powers of egg-laying prematurely fail, she is 
