134 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 
using the last pulsations of her worn-out, ragged 
wings to carry her away to the traditional burial- 
place of the hive; or her end may be to fall under 
the stroke of the State executioners. For the 
old-age problem has long ago discovered its 
effective solution in the bee-republic. Justice 
that is capable of being tempered with mercy 
carries its own mark of imperfection indelibly 
upon it. When the principle of all for the common 
good has been driven to its last resort in logic, 
mercy to the individual can only be another name 
for robbing Peter to pay Paul. In bee-communism 
the sole title to life is utility, and so the old worn- 
out, useless workers must go. 
The development of the worker-egg through 
its various stages of growth, until the perfectly 
formed insect emerges from the cell, makes a 
curious study. The egg itself is remarkable, for 
it is covered with an hexagonal pattern. The 
large compound eyes of the fully grown bee also 
show this form. Each eye consists of about four 
thousand separate lenses, and each lens is a regular 
hexagon. Wonder has often been expressed at 
the ingenuity of the comb-builders in making the 
cells six-sided, and thus crowding into a given 
space more compartments than could be secured 
by the same amount of material wrought into any 
other shape. The ancient writers explained this 
choice of the hexagonal cell by the supposed fact 
that the six legs of the bee were simultaneously 
