egg fast to the bottom. When the honey season is at its height, she works with great rapidity; sometimes she lays at the rate of six eggs per minute, often laying three thousand or twice her own weight of eggs per day. She is a wise queen, however, and has in mind the dangers of overpopulation. When there is much honey brought in, and the swarming season is at hand, she enlarges her empire rapidly; but when there is little honey, she keeps the amount of brood down to what can be cared for. Whether this question of limiting the population is decided by the queen, or whether she simply acts in response to the food given her by the workers, is a question not yet settled. However this may be, it is certain that Malthusian doctrines are rigorously and successfully practised by the perfect socialists of the hive.
Sometimes when the honey flow is very great an intoxication of work seems to possess the colony. The bees, coming in from the field, will drop the honey anywhere, and the queen, agitated by the general spirit of the hive, will drop her eggs everywhere; and the poor, overworked, bee housekeepers have to pick up the honey and store it in the cells, and pick up the eggs and glue them fast to the cell-bottoms.
THE DRONE (Plates V, VI, VII)
Of all the denizens of the hive the lot of the drones is the least enviable. That one may surely fulfil the destiny as king father, many are born, only to be
