THE BEE-MILK MYSTERY 207 
a creature of the open air and sunshine; the queen 
dull of intelligence, possessed of a jealous hatred 
of her peers, for whom all the light and colour and 
fragrance of a summer’s morning have no allure- 
ments, a being whose every instinct keeps her, from 
year’s end to year’s end, pent in the crowded tropic 
gloom of the hive. 
But the bee-milk as well as being the main 
ingredient in the larval food, has other and almost 
equally important uses. It is supplied by the 
workers to the adult queen and drones throughout 
nearly the whole of their lives, and forms an indis- 
pensable part of their daily diet. And this gives 
us a clue in our attempt to understand, not only 
how the population of the hive is regulated, but 
why the males are so easily disposed of when the 
annual drone-massacre sets in. By giving or depriv- 
ing her of the bee-milk, the workers can either stim- 
ulate the queen to an enormous daily output of eggs 
or reduce her fertility to a bare minimum; and, as for 
the drones, it is starvation that is the secret of their 
half-hearted, feeble resistance to fate. 
Yet though we may recount these things, and 
speak of this mysterious essence called bee-milk as 
really the mainspring of all effort and achievement 
within the hive, it is doubtful whether we have 
solved the greatest mystery of all about it. Of what 
is it composed, and whence is it derived? The 
generally-accepted explanation of its origin is that 
it is pollen-chyle regurgitated from the second 
stomach of the bee, combined with the secretions 
from certain glands of the mouth in passing. But 
the most careful dissections have never revealed 
anything like bee-milk in any part of the bee’s 
