82 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 
With hundreds of prolific mothers in the hive, 
each having enough to do at home in rearing her 
own children, and a crowd of lazy, irresponsible 
drones who could do nothing but dance in the 
sunshine or go a-wooing, how were the daily needs 
of the hive to be satisfied, leaving out of account 
the provision that must be made for coming winter 
days? It was clearly a case of reform or annihila- 
tion; and it may be conceived that the woman- 
bees, in default of masculine initiative, took the 
reins into their own hands. 
It is a prophetic story. First they discovered 
their latent powers. The harmless ovipositor 
revealed itself as a prime weapon of offence. 
Thus the army was with the revolutionaries, and 
the rest was easy. A great, far-reaching scheme 
was set afoot. Motherhood was to be a privilege 
of the few and the fittest; work the compulsory 
lot of the mass. Hard times had already bred a 
lean, unfertile gang among them, and it was dis- 
covered that famine rations in the nursery meant 
a wholesale increase in these natural spinsters of 
the race. Henceforth the little sex-atrophied 
worker-bee was multiplied in the hive, while the 
fully nurtured mothers were gradually reduced to 
a few—at last to one alone. It was a triumph 
of collective self-sacrifice for the well-being and 
high persistence of the race. 
All this may be imagined as having taken place 
in infinitely remote times, long before man suc- 
