THE DRONE AND HIS STORY 243 
in the air as a sort of protest against all this anxious 
industry going on about him. Once gone from the 
neighbourhood of the hive, he seems to keep in- 
cessantly on the wing until hunger prompts him 
home again. For no one has ever seen a drone- 
bee among the insects that haunt the flowers, nor 
ever seen him basking on a sunlit wall or tree- 
trunk, after the kind of almost every other winged 
atom in the universe. 
He comes back to the hive with the same noisy, 
careless fanfaronade, and is received by the workers 
with the same sullen indifference. They give him 
his fill of bee-milk, linking tongues with him as he 
sits up like an overgrown baby, voracious, clamour- 
ing to be fed. They suffer him to swill at the 
honey-stores unchecked, but plainly regard him 
with contumely. He is a terrible expense to the 
State, yet a necessary one. Silently they go about 
their uncongenial business of nourishing him— 
silently, and with an ominous patience. They 
grudge him every drop, and, all the more, urge 
him to his excesses. It is not for long. The day 
of reckoning is near at hand. Already the poppies 
glow scarlet on the hill—the poppies that mark the 
turning-point of the summer ; and after them the 
long decline, with its ever-diminishing sun-glow ; 
each day with a scantier meed of blossom, until 
the path runs again into the dreary levels, the 
sober greys and russets, of winter death. 
Now the worker-bee is to show a grizzly seam 
16——2 
