THE KING’S BEE-MASTER 147 
conveniently for his own purposes, it must be 
admitted not only that he argued the case with 
singular adroitness, but that never did facts adapt 
themselves so readily to either conscious or 
unconscious misrepresentation. In the  glass- 
windowed hives of the Royal bee-house at Saint 
James’s, he was able to show the King a nation of 
creatures evidently united under a common rule, 
labouring together in harmony and producing works 
little short of miraculous to the medizval eye. He 
saw that these creatures were of two sorts, each 
going about its duty after its kind, but that in each 
colony there was one bee, and only one, which 
differed entirely from the rest. To this single large 
bee all the others paid the greatest deference. It 
was cared for and nourished, and attended assidu- 
ously in its progress over the combs. All the 
humanly approved tokens of royalty were manifest 
about it. No wonder the King’s bee-master was 
not slow in recognising that, in those troublous 
times, he could do his patron no greater service 
than by pointing out to the superstitious and 
ignorant multitude—still looking askance at the 
restored monarchy—such indisputable evidence in 
nature of Charles’s parallel right. 
And perhaps nature has never been at such pains 
to conceal her true processes from the vulgar eye 
as in this case of the honey-bee. If Rusden ever 
suspected that the one large bee in each colony was 
really the mother of all the rest, and had set himself 
to prove it, he would have found the whole array 
of visible facts in opposition to him. If ever a truth 
seemed established beyond all reasonable doubt, it 
