The Swarm 
@ queen; nor will a queen ever draw hers 
on a man, an animal, or an ordinary bee. 
She will never unsheath her royal weapon 
— curved, in scimeter fashion, instead of 
being straight, like that of the ordinary 
bee — save only in the case of her doing 
battle with an equal: in other words, 
with a sister queen. 
No bee, it would seem, dare take on 
herself the horror of direct and bloody 
regicide. Whenever, therefore, the good 
order and prosperity of the republic 
appear to demand that a queen shall die, 
they endeavour to give to her death some 
semblance of natural decease, and by infi- 
nite subdivision of the crime, to render it 
almost anonymous. 
They will, therefore, to use the pictur- 
esque expression of the apiarist, “ ball” 
the queenly intruder ; in other words, they 
will entirely surround her with their innu- 
merable interlaced bodies. They will 
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