150 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW 
one theory which seems to have been essentially his 
own. The little lumps of many-coloured pollen, 
which the worker-bees fetch home so industriously 
in the breeding season, he held to be the actual 
substance of the young bees to come, in an 
elementary state. These, he tells us, were placed 
in the cells, having absorbed the feminine virtues 
from their bearers on the way. The king-bee then 
visited each in turn, vivifying them with his essence, 
after which they had nothing to do but grow into 
perfect bees. He got over the difficulty of the 
varying sexes of the bees bred in a hive by asserting 
that these lumps of animable matter were created 
in the flowers, either female, or neuter—as he 
called the drones—or royal, as the case might be. 
Having denied the drones any part in the production 
of their species, or in furnishing the needs of the 
hive, Rusden was hard put to it to find a use for 
them in a system where it would have been lése- 
majesté to suppose anything superfluous or amiss. 
He therefore hits upon an idea which, curiously 
enough, embodies matter still under dispute at the 
present time, although it is being slowly recognised 
as a truth. Rusden says the use of the drones is to 
take the place of the other bees in the hive when 
these are mostly away honey-gathering. Their 
great bodies act as so many warming stoves, 
supplying the necessary heat to the hatching embryos 
and the maturing stores of honey. It is well 
known that drones gather together side by side, 
principally in the remoter parts of the hive, often 
completely covering these outer combs. They 
seldom rouse from their lethargy of repletion to 
