40 AUSTRALASIAN 



CHAPTER III. 



INMATES OF THE HIVE— THEIR NATURAL 

 HISTORY. 



The honey-bee is, above all things, gregarious in its habits. 

 As Langstroth remarks, " It can flourish only when associated 

 in large numbers as a colony. In a solitary state a single bee 

 is almost as helpless as a new-born child, being paralysed by 

 the chill of a cold summer's night." This is true ; but it is 

 not alone for the sake of mutual warmth that bees aggregate ; 

 their nature compels them to form a sort of republic (or, if 

 rather a monarchy, then certainly a very limited one), which 

 presents the peculiar feature that all the active citizens are, as 

 we shall see further on, females, who are doomed to a life of 

 celibacy as well as of toil, while the head of the community is, 

 in the strictest sense of the word, the mother of her whole 

 people; and although they support, for a time, a "pampered aris- 

 tocracy " of idle males, they use very little ceremony in getting 

 rid of them as soon as there appears to be no further chance 

 of their presence being required. 



GENERAL DESCRIPTION. 



Every hive in a normal working condition, during the swarm- 

 ing season, will be found to contain bees of the three different 

 kinds, the characteristics and relative sizes of which are shown 

 in the illustrations which follow. First, one bee only of the 

 peculiar form which denotes the queen or mother bee ; secondly, 

 a few hundreds (sometimes more than a thousand) of large 

 bees, called drones ; and thirdly, many thousands of the smaller 

 kind, called workers, which are the common bees to be seen on 

 blossoms, as neither the queen bee nor the drones gather 

 honey or work outside the hive. 



