The Life of the Bee 
and throw a general glance round, we only 
need say that the hive is composed of a 
queen, the mother of all her people; of 
thousands of workers, or neuters, who are 
incomplete and sterile females; and, .Jastly, 
of some hundreds of males, from whom one 
shall be chosen as the sole and unfortunate 
consort of the queen that the workers will 
elect in the future, after the more or less 
voluntary departure of the reigning mother. 
6 
The first time that we open a hive there 
comes over us an emotion akin to that we 
might feel at profaning some unknown 
object, charged perhaps with dreadful sur- 
prise, as a tomb. A legend of menace and 
peril still clings to the bee. There is the dis- 
tressful recollection of her sting, which pro- 
duces a pain so characteristic that one knows 
not wherewith to compare it: a kind of 
destroying dryness, a flame of the desert rush- 
ing over the wounded limb, as though these 
daughters of the sun had distilled a dazzling 
poison from their father’s angry rays, in order 
20 
