THE COMMONWEALTH OF THE HIVE 73 



rest of her life, which may endure for years, she 

 passes her time in immaculate widowhood, yet 

 retaining her fertility to the end. 



She is pointed out to the gaping novice as she 

 travels her unceasing round of the brood-combs, and 

 her various attributes are explained to him. He is 

 shown how much larger she is than the worker- 

 bee ; how her bodily structure differs in a dozen 

 important ways ; how her instincts and habits re- 

 semble those of the common worker hardly in a 

 single particular. Finally he is told something at 

 which the most polite credulity may well demur. 

 Although the mother-bee is to all appearances of a 

 totally different race, the egg from which she was 

 raised was identical with that which produces the 

 little worker. Her bodily size, the change in the 

 number and shape of her organs, her mental dif- 

 ferences, are all due to treatment and diet alone. 

 There is no reason why she should not have been an 

 ordinary neuter working- bee, nor why anyone of the 

 thirty or forty thousand little workers in a hive should 

 not have become a great queen-bee, the sole mother 

 of an entire colony, save for the edict of the communal 

 mind. More wonderful still, the drones, the male 

 bees — the brothers, never the fathers, of thei" own 

 hive, as has been so often stated — owe the fact of 

 their sex entirely to the will or whim of the hive 

 authorities, working through the docile agency of 

 the queen. Until the moment before the egg is 

 laid, the question of the sex of the resulting bee 



