98 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 
Yet the truth is that the queen-bee is the very 
reverse of a monarch, both by nature and inclina- 
tion. She possesses only the merest rudiments 
of intelligence. She has a magnificent body, great 
docility, certain almost unrestrainable impulses 
and passions, a yielding, womanish love of the 
yoke; but she is incapable of action other than 
that arising from her bodily promptings. Her 
brain is much smaller than that of the worker. 
In a dozen different ways she is inferior to the 
common worker-bees, who rule her absolutely, 
mapping out her entire daily life and using her 
for the good of the colony, just as a delicate, costly 
piece of mechanism is used by human craftsmen 
to produce some necessary article of trade. 
In a word, the queen is the sole surviving 
representative of the aboriginal female honey-bee. 
The aborted females, the workers, are almost as 
much a product of civilisation as the human race 
itself. 
Every step of the way now, in a study of the 
life of the bee, is hedged about with wonders. It 
is seen that the common worker-bee is raised in a 
cell allowing her only the barest minimum of space 
for development, while the queen has an apartment 
twice as long as she can possibly need. The 
worker-cells are so designed that as many as 
possible may be contained in a given area, and 
their construction involve theleast possible amount 
of material. Therefore these cells are made in the 
