40 AUSTRALASIAN 
CH ALP Wee. be aii 
INMATES OF THE HIVE--THEIR NATURAL 
HISTORY. 
THE honey-bee is, above all things, gregarious in its habits. 
As Langstroth remarks, “It can flourish only when associated 
in large numbers as a colony. Ina solitary state a single bee 
is almost as helpless as a new-born child, being paralysed by 
the chill of a cold summer’s night.” This is true; but it is 
not alone for the sake of mutual warmth that bees aggregate ; 
their nature compels them to form a sort of republic (or, if 
rather a monarchy, then certainly a very limited one), which 
presents the peculiar feature that all the active citizens are, as 
we shall see further on, females, who are doomed to a life of 
celibacy as well as of toil, while the head of the community is, 
in the strictest sense of the word, the mother of her whole 
people; and although they support, for a time, a “pampered aris- 
tocracy ” of idle males, they use very little ceremony in getting 
rid of them as soon as there appears to be no further chance 
of their presence being required. 
GENERAL DESCRIPTION. 
Every hive ina normal working condition, during the swarm- 
ing season, will be found to contain bees of the three different 
kinds, the characteristics and relative sizes of which are shown 
in the illustrations which follow. First, one bee only of the 
peculiar form which denotes the queen or mother bee , secondly 
a few hundreds (sometimes more than a thousand) of large 
bees, called drones ; and thirdly, many thousands of the smaller 
kind, called workers, which are the common bees to be seen on 
blossoms, as neither the queen bee nor the drones gather 
honey or work outside the hive. = 
