THE SOVEREIGN WORKER-BEE 133 



with which it is furnished, and which, in the queen, 

 contains an all but harmless fluid, is now filled with 

 an active poison. Above all, she develops a brain- 

 power far in excess of that of the normal female 

 bee, her mother ; and she acquires a whole new 

 set of impulses and aspirations from beginning to 

 end. 



While the queen-bee's natural element is the 

 obscurity of the hive, and she would seem both to 

 hate and fear the sunshine, the worker is essenti- 

 ally an outdoor creature, revelling in the light and 

 air. While the queen, though obedient to the 

 destiny that has made her over-fruitful, displays 

 nevertheless not the slightest joy of motherhood 

 nor interest in her children, the worker, doomed 

 to eternal spinsterhood, yet constitutes herself 

 the true mother and nurse and instructress of all 

 the young in the hive. And the price exacted for 

 the authority and power which she usurps, or was 

 usurped for her by those remote ancestors of hers 

 who first invented the sexless honey-bee, must 

 be paid in the hardest coin — that of life itself. 

 Instead of the years that nature allotted to her 

 kind in the beginning, she is to endure hardly as 

 many months. Destiny, and her own vaulting 

 ambitions, have given her too arduous a part to 

 play. Her stunted, yet over-elaborated body and 

 over-developed brain, cannot long hold out against 

 the wear and tear of the life she is born to. At 

 best a few months see her dead at her work, or 



