THE DRONE AND HIS STORY 235 
denied that the communal life of the honey-bee is 
a high civilisation ; that it has grown to be what 
it is to-day through ages of necessity ; that the one 
sex has the other under a complete and terrible 
subjection, for which, and for the privilege of all 
power, the dominant sex has paid a terrible price. 
The worker-bee to-day is an over-intellectual, 
neurotic, morbidly dutiful creature, while the drone 
is admittedly nothing but a stupid, happy, sensual 
lout. If the extreme difference between the sexes 
in bee-life had been aboriginal, the relations of 
drone and worker, as we see them in the hives 
to-day, would be meet and reasonable enough ; 
but there seems to be clear evidence that, far back 
in the life of the race, the female bee was not so 
hopelessly superior to her mate. The queen-bee, 
in all likelihood, fairly represents the mother-bee 
as she was before the cooling crust of the earth 
made some sort of protected habitation necessary, 
which led first to close clustering for mutual 
warmth, and then gradually developed the com- 
plicated hive-life of to-day. But evolution will 
hardly account for all that we see: revolution 
must have had its part in the production of the 
modern self-unsexed worker. It has been seen 
that there is no physiological reason why each 
worker in the hive should not have grown into the 
fertile mother of thousands. The workers are not 
a stunted, specialised race, slowly evolved by time 
and necessity, and procreating their own stunted 
