BEE-MASTERS IN THE MIDDLE AGES 33 
Rusden was only echoing the belief immemorially 
established among the beemen of the past. 
The single large bee, which all knew to exist in 
each hive, was generally looked upon as the abso- 
lute ruler of the community. It is variously 
described as a king or queen by writers in the 
sixteenth and seventeenth century, but only in the 
sense of a governor ; and the word chosen largely 
depended on the -sex of the august person who 
happened to occupy the English throne at the 
time. Thus Rusden very wisely discarded the 
notion of a queen-bee when he had to deal with 
Charles the Second. Butler, perhaps the most 
learned of the medizval writers on the honey-bee, 
as astutely forbore to mention the word king, his 
book being published in the reign of Queen Anne. 
He calls it ‘“‘ The Feminine Monarchie,” but seems 
to have no more suspected the truth that the large 
bee was really the mother of the whole colony 
than any of his predecessors. Almost alone in his 
day, however, he refuses to accept the flower 
theory of bee-generation, and asserts that the 
worker-bees and drones are the females and males 
respectively. But, he says, they ‘‘engender not. 
as other living creatures; onely they suffer their 
Drones among them for a season, by whose Mascu- 
line virtue they strangely conceive and breed for the 
preservation of their sweet kinde.” He gets over 
the difficulty of there being no drones in the hive 
for nine months in the year, during part of which 
3 
