THE SOVEREIGN WORKER-BEE 133 
with which it is furnished, and{which, in the queen, 
contains an all but harmless fluidjis now filled with 
an active poison. Above all, she develops a brain- 
power far in excess of that of the normal female 
bee, her mother; and she acquires a whole new 
set of impulses and aspirations from beginning to 
end. 
While the queen-bee’s natural element is the 
obscurity of the hive, and she would seem both to 
hate and fear the sunshine, the worker is essenti- 
ally an outdoor creature, revelling in the light and 
air. While the queen, though obedient to the 
destiny that has made her over-fruitful, displays 
nevertheless not the slightest joy of motherhood 
nor interest in her children, the worker, doomed 
to eternal spinsterhood, yet constitutes herself 
the true mother and nurse and instructress of all 
the young in the hive. And the price exacted for 
the authority and power which she usurps, or was 
usurped for her by those remote ancestors of hers 
who first invented the sexless honey-bee, must 
be paid in the hardest coin—that of life itself. 
Instead of the years that nature allotted to her 
kind in the beginning, she is to endure hardly as 
many months. Destiny, and her own vaulting 
ambitions, have given her too arduous a part to 
play. Her stunted, yet over-elaborated body and 
over-developed brain, cannot long hold out against 
the wear and tear of the life she is born to. At 
best a few months see her dead at her work, or 
aot 
