74 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 
is held in abeyance. This big lusty drone, with 
his exuberant masculinity obvious in his every 
posture and act; his totally different organism ; 
his incapacity for anything else than the fulfilment 
of the one office required of him, for he cannot 
even feed himself; his habit of spending his life 
either in a comfortable lethargy of repletion at 
home, or in amorous knight-errantry abroad— 
this drone might have been a little plodding 
worker-bee, with shrunken yet elaborated body 
and curiously developed brain, whose one idea in 
life is to get through the largest amount of work 
before death claims her, and who is armed with 
a formidable poisoned sting, while the drone has 
none. 
It is useless at this stage to tell the learner that 
all these vital differences—miracles, indeed, in the 
ordinary meaning of the word—are brought about 
by the leading powers of the hive in certain simple, 
easily explainable ways. He has lost, for the 
moment, all sight of and interest in the details, 
however extraordinary, in the perception that has 
dawned on him of the vastness of the entire plan. 
Here is a community that, to all appearances, has 
solved every problem relating to the well-being 
and progress of a crowded, highly organised 
society. Questions that are now vexing socialistic 
philosophers in the human world, or are looming 
dark intheimmediate future—problemsof numerical 
increase in relation to food-supply, the balance of 
