xxii THE LORE OF THfi HONEY-BEE 



families, each with its deep-voiced, ponderous 

 father-bee, its fruitful mother, and its tribe of 

 youngsters growing up, and in time setting forth 

 to establish homes for themselves. There is no 

 reason why each one of the thirty or forty thousand 

 pinched virgins in a hive should not have become 

 a fully developed, prolific queen-bee, if only the 

 right food, in sufficient quantity, had been given 

 her in her larval state. But the need for the single 

 large community arose. The system of a single 

 national mother was instituted. The great re- 

 nunciation was made, for good or ill. And then 

 the trouble, from the masculine point of view, began. 

 It must be borne in mind that, strictly speaking, 

 the honey-bee does not, and never did, possess a 

 sting. What is commonly known as her sting is 

 really an ovipositor, and it is as such that it is 

 almost exclusively used by the modern queen-bee 

 in every hive to-day. But when the first hordes 

 of worker-bees were brought into the world, re- 

 duced by the science of ' starvation to little more 

 than sexless sinews and brains, they seemed to 

 have conceived a terrible revenge on their 

 ancestors. The useless ovipositor was turned into 

 a weapon of offence, against which the drone's 

 magnificent panoply of sound and fury availed 

 him nothing. Matriarchy was established at the 



