xxii THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 
families, each with its deep-voiced, ponderous 
father-bee, its fruitful mother, and its tribe of 
youngsters growing up, and in time setting forth 
to establish homes for themselves. There is no 
reason why each one of the thirty or forty thousand 
pinched virgins in a hive should not have become 
a fully developed, prolific queen-bee, if only the 
right food, in sufficient quantity, had been given 
her in her larval state. But the need for the single 
large community arose. The system of a single 
national mother was instituted. The great re- 
nunciation was made, for good or ill. And then 
the trouble, from the masculine point of view, began. 
It must be borne in mind that, strictly speaking, 
the honey-bee does not, and never did, possess a 
sting. What is commonly known as her sting is 
really an ovipositor, and it is as such that it is 
almost exclusively used by the modern queen-bee 
in every hive to-day. But when the first hordes 
of worker-bees were brought into the world, re- 
duced by the science of starvation to little more 
than sexless sinews and brains, they seemed to 
have conceived a terrible revenge on their 
ancestors. The useless ovipositor was turned into 
a weapon of offence, against which the drone’s 
magnificent panoply of sound and fury availed 
him nothing. Matriarchy was established at the 
