NATURAL HISTORY OF THE HONEY BEE. 19 



" The sad-ey'd justice with his surly hum, 

 Delivering o'er to executors pale, 

 The lazy, yawning Drone." — Shakespeare. 



When suffering this ill treatment Drones will take 

 refuge in any neighbouring hives, and where one is 

 Oueenless they will be welcomed and allowed to remain 

 unmolested. The number of Drones in a hive varies 

 considerably from one hundred or two hundred to some 

 thousands. 



I do not know that the length of life of the Drone 

 has been satisfactorily ascertained — in fact, we may 

 conclude they usually meet with a violent death before 

 they are three months old, but I have in a Queenless 

 stock kept Drones alive from Autumn until the follow- 

 ing Spring. Drones, the progeny of a fertile Worker, 

 are commonly reared in Worker cells ; in this case they 

 are diminutive in size — scarcely larger than Workers. 

 The act of copulation with the Queen is instantly fatal 

 to the Drone, and in separating, the Queen drags out his 

 organs, which remain attached to her for some time after 

 her return home. 



The possession of a hive of Bees affords a fund of 

 material by which many instructive and amusing experi- 

 ments may be carried out, and by which facts in natural 

 history may be brought to light, perhaps small in them- 

 selves, but great in the aggregate. 



Sir John Lubbock has initiated such experiments in 

 endeavouring to arrive at a knowledge of how far Bees 

 are endowed with power of communicating intelligence 

 one to another — his conclusions are not very favourable 

 to the Bees ; I give the Bees more credit for that power 

 than he does, but have made no special observations to 

 demonstrate the point. In a paper communicated to 

 the Linnean Society, Sir John Lubbock states, he 



c 2 



