THE COMMONWEALTH OF THE HIVE 73 
rest of her life, which may endure for years, she 
passes her time in immaculate widowhood, yet 
retaining her fertility to the end. 
She is pointed out to the gaping novice as she 
travels her unceasing round of the brood-combs, and 
her various attributes are explained to him. He is 
shown how much larger she is than the worker- 
bee; how her bodily structure differs in a dozen 
important ways ; how her instincts and habits re- 
semble those of the common worker hardly in a 
single particular. Finally he is told something at 
which the most polite credulity may well demur. 
Although the mother-bee is to all appearances of a 
totally different race, the egg from which she was 
raised was identical with that which produces the 
little worker. Her bodily size, the change in the 
number and shape of her organs, her mental dif- 
ferences, are all due to treatment and diet alone. 
There is no reason why she should not have been an 
ordinary neuter working-bee, nor why any one of the 
thirty or forty thousand little workers ina hive should 
not have become a great queen-bee, the sole mother 
of an entire colony, save for the edict of the communal 
mind. More wonderful still, the drones, the male 
bees—the brothers, never the fathers, of their own 
hive, as has been so often stated—owe the fact of 
their sex entirely to the will or whim of the hive 
authorities, working through the docile agency of 
the queen. Until the moment before the egg is 
laid, the question of the sex of the resulting bee 
