98 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 



Yet the truth is that the queen-bee is the very 

 reverse of a monarch, both by nature and inclina- 

 tion. She possesses only the merest rudiments 

 of intelligence. She has a magnificent body, great 

 docility, certain almost unrestrainable impulses 

 and passions, a yielding, womanish love of the 

 yoke ; but she is incapable of action other than 

 that arising from her bodily promptings. Her 

 brain is much smaller than that of the worker. 

 In a dozen different ways she is inferior to the 

 common worker-bees, who rule her absolutely, 

 mapping out her entire daily life and using her 

 for the good of the colony, just as a delicate, costly 

 piece of mechanism is used by human craftsmen 

 to produce some necessary article of trade. 



In a word, the queen is the sole surviving 

 representative of the aboriginal female honey-bee. 

 The aborted females, the workers, are almost as 

 much a product of civilisation as the human race 

 itself. 



Every step of the way now, in a study of the 

 life of the bee, is hedged about with wonders. It 

 is seen that the common worker-bee is raised in a 

 cell allowing her only the barest minimum of space 

 for development, while the queen has an apartment 

 twice as long as she can possibly need. The 

 worker-cells are so designed that as many as 

 possible may be contained in a given area, and 

 their construction involve the least possible amount 

 of material. Therefore these cells are made in the 



