THE GENESIS OF THE QUEEN 105 
because more destructive of old, hallowed conven- 
tion, than any that has gone before. 
The hive that has lost its mother-bee, and failed 
to provide her with a fully developed, fertile suc- 
cessor, is seen to be rapidly declining in its worker- 
population, while the horde of drones is increasing 
at a greater rate than ever. But where do these 
drones come from, if the very fount of bee-life has 
been dried up at its source by the loss of a ferti- 
lised queen? The question brings the student to 
what is perhaps the most remarkable fact in the 
whole great book of natural history. 
We are not concerned, for the moment, with 
theological matters; nor will the thread of the 
story of the honey-bee be laid down, however 
briefly, for an excursion into the pulpit. Yet here 
is something that may well give wherewithal for 
thought. For nearly two thousand years the 
Doctrine of the Virgin Birth has been the centre of 
a bitter human controversy. Its liegemen uphold it 
as a main article of faith, eternally exalted from the 
odious need of proof ; its temperate opposers sadly 
and quietly set it aside as a natural impossibility. On 
one side the charge is want of faith; on the other 
of blind credulity. And yet no one seems to have 
thought of looking into paths of creation other than 
human, to see if no parallel exists that may help 
both sides, and send the swords to sheath before a 
common mystery. The honey-bee is small among 
the fowls, but here she looms large in the world, a 
