172 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 
doubly sure, this thorough-minded amazon must 
fill the haft of her triple blade with a subtle poison, 
and so contrive its sliding mechanism that the 
same impulse, which drives the points successively 
forward, drenches the whole weapon with a fatal 
juice. 
The tendency to be unduly scientific, to meet 
these things with exact and unimaginative interest, 
receives its final quietus here. For he who 
realises the whole deadly efficacy of the honey- 
bee’s sting cannot logically pass it by as a mere 
remarkable provision of nature, praising God for 
it complacently, but must concede it a much wider 
significance. This complicated weapon of the 
stunted, sex-perverted worker-bee owes its exist- 
ence as much to deliberate art as to nature, or 
those who watch the Omnipotent in hive-life are 
strangely and perversely led astray. In the queen- 
mother, whose physical organism may be said to 
be comparatively unchanged from its aboriginal 
type, we see the part corresponding to the worker’s 
sting, essentially another creation. The queen’s 
ovipositor is longer ; it is curved; the barbs upon 
it are small and insignificant; the fluid in the 
secreting-gland is no poison at all, but a thick 
opaque substance, whose true use is probably to 
glue the eggs safely to the bottoms of the cells. 
She is also provided with a pair of blunt instru- 
ments covered with sensitive hairs, which serve, 
with the ovipositor, to guide the egg securely to 
