148 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW 
was that the ordinary male-and-female principle, 
pertaining throughout the rest of creation, was 
abrogated in the single instance of the honey-bee. 
The ancients explained this anomaly as a special 
gift from the gods, and the bees were supposed to 
discover the germs of bee-life in certain kinds of 
flowers and to bring them home to the cells for 
development. Rusden improved upon this idea by 
assigning to his king-bee the duty of fertilising 
these embryos when they were placed in the cells, 
for he could not otherwise explain a fact of which 
he was perfectly well aware—that the large bee 
travelled the combs unceasingly, thrusting its body 
into each cell in turn. Rusden also held that the 
worker-bees were females, but only—as Freemasons 
would say—in a speculative manner. They neither 
laid eggs nor bore young. Their maternal duties 
consisted only in gathering the essence of bee-life 
from the blossoms and nursing and tending the 
young bees when they emerged from their cradle- 
cells. The drones were a great difficulty to Rusden. 
To admit them to be males—as some held even in 
his day—would have been against the declared 
object of his book, as tending to entrench upon 
royal prerogatives. Luckily, this truth was as easy 
of apparent refutation as all the rest. No one had 
ever detected any traffic of the sexes amongst bees 
either in or out of the hives; nor, indeed, is such 
detection possible. The fact that the queen-bee has 
concourse with the drone only once in her whole 
life, and that their meeting takes place in the upper 
air far out of reach of human observation, is know- 
ledge only of yesterday. In Rusden’s time such a 
