A ROMANCE OF ANATOMY 173 
its destination. The worker-bee has these feelers 
on either side of her sting, but she has perverted 
them to a very different office, that of seeking out 
the vulnerable parts of her enemy. And what a 
drastic change her will, or that of her foster- 
mothers, has wrought in the whole contrivance! 
She has bartered the privilege of motherhood and 
years of life for a few short months and a share 
in the communal sovereignty. She must be ready 
to further the well-being of the hive by the art of 
war as well as by the arts of peace. Therefore 
she has deliberately helped in fashioning the 
ploughshares into cannon. A little change in her 
food as a nursling, an infinitesimal leaking from 
a gland that takes the full power of the strongest 
glass to see,—and, with all the other multitudinous 
changes of form and character, this last miracle 
comes quietly into being. The egg-depositing 
shaft grows short and straight; its moderate in- 
dentations become cruel jagged barbs designed to 
hold as well as to kill; the harmless, egg-fastening 
gluten is quickened into a virulent poison; and 
the death-dealing thing is ready and ripe for 
service against all honey-lovers, the hereditary 
foes of the hive. 
