
teh itp 

344 THE INSECT WORLD. 
their mission is over. By an inexorable law of nature they must 
be got rid of, and the working bees proceed to make general nias- 
sacre of them. It is in the months of July and August that this 
frightful carnage takes place. The workers may then be seen 
furiously giving chase to the males, and pursuing them to the ex- 
tremity of the hive, where these unfortunate insects seek a place of 
safety. Three or four workers dash off in the pursuit after a male. 
They seize hold of him, pull him by his legs, by his wings, by his 
antenne, and kill him with their stings. This pitiless massacre 
includes even the larvee and pupe of the males. The executioners 
drag them from their cells, run them through with their stings, 
greedily suck the liquids contained in their bodies, and then 
cast their remains to the winds. This slaughter goes on for many 
days, continuing till the males have been completely got rid of, 
they not being able to defend themselves, as they have no stings. 
They are allowed to live, however, when they are fortunate 
enough to inhabit a hive deprived of its queen. There they even 
find a place of perfect safety when they have been driven out of 
another hive, and' may be met with in this refuge until the’ 
month of January. In like manner the lives of the males are 
spared in those hives which, instead of a true queen, have only a 
female half impregnated, which lays only male eggs; but a hive 
of this kind, whose active population cannot be increased, ends 
by being abandoned by its inhabitants. The sterility or absence 
of the queen entails the dissolution of the society. She is, in fact, 
the life and soul of the hive, and without her there is no hope, no 
courage, no activity. The populace, abandoned to itself, falls into 
anarchy. Famine, pillage, ruin, and death are at. its doors. 
Having no progeny to set their hopes on, the bees live from one 
day to another without a care for the morrow. They leave off 
working, and live entirely on theft and rapine, and at last they 
disappear entirely. It is a society become rotten and broken up 
for the want of a moral tie. 
If the loss of the mother bee takes place at a period at which 
there still exist in the hive some larve of working bees of 
less than three days old, the nurses (as we have already said) 
adopt some of these laryee, and make them into queens by means 
of the physical education and the special nourishment which 







