and runs, she is brought back and must try again--once,
maybe twice; then, if she runs yet once more for her life, judicial
death is her portion; her children pack themselves into a ball around
her person and hold her in that compact grip two or three days, until
she starves to death or is suffocated. Meantime the victor bee is
receiving royal honors and performing the one royal function--laying
eggs.

As regards the ethics of the judicial assassination of the queen, that
is a matter of politics, and will be discussed later, in its proper
place.

During substantially the whole of her short life of five or six years
the queen lives in Egyptian darkness and stately seclusion of the royal
apartments, with none about her but plebeian servants, who give her
empty lip-affection in place of the love which her heart hungers for;
who spy upon her in the interest of her waiting heirs, and report and
exaggerate her defects and deficiencies to them; who fawn upon her and
flatter her to her face and slander her behind her back; who grovel
before her in the day of her power and forsake her in her age and
weakness. There she sits, friendless, upon her throne through the long
night of her life, cut off from the consoling sympathies and sweet
companionship and loving endearments which she craves, by the gilded
barriers of her awful rank; a forlorn exile in her own house and home,
weary object of formal ceremonies and machine-made worship, winged child
of the sun, native to the free air and the blue skies and the flowery
fields, doomed by the splendid accident of her birth to trade this
priceless heritage for a black captivity, a tinsel grandeur, and a
loveless life, with shame and insult at the end and a cruel death--and
condemned by the human instinct in her to hold the bargain valuable!

Huber, Lubbock, Maeterlinck--in fact, all the great authorities--are
agreed in denying that the bee is a member of the human family. I do not
know why they have done this, but I think it is from dishonest motives.
Why, the innumerable facts brought to light by their own painstaking
and exhaustive experiments prove that if there is a master fool in the
world, it is the bee. That seems to settle it.

But that is the way of the scientist. He will spend thirty years in
building up a mountain range of facts with the intent to prove a
certain theory; then he is so happy in his achievement that as a rule
he overlooks the main chief fact of all--that his