Her consort, the DRONE, is the male of the hive, and although the queen is monandrous or single-spoused, and although the hive during the season rarely throws off more than three swarms, usually restricted to the accompaniment of a single queen, and thus but three males are absolutely required, nature is so provident of the great design of perpetuation, that to provide against the possibility of its frustration, the hive usually produces about a thousand drones. A peculiarity in the structure of the drone which facilitates his discovery of the virgin queen when she issues from the hive on the bridal excursion, which she makes preliminary to her heading a swarm of emigrants, or assuming monarchy at home, consists in the vertical enlargement of his compound eyes, which meet over the brow, and in the posterior expansion of the inferior wings, which take a broad backward sweep, giving the insect larger powers of flight, but perhaps required as much by its own bulkiness and weight as for the purpose of ascending above his bride in the upper regions of the air; but that its weight cannot be the sole reason is testified by the analogous structure in the male of the genus _Astata_, one of the fossorial _Hymenoptera_, where a similar expansion of the inferior wing is concomitant with a similar development of the compound eyes, yet in which the abdomen is very small, and this power is therefore evidently given to these merely to increase the velocity or the duration of their flight. The rest of the structure of these drones disables them, like all other male bees, for any labour; and as they must be sustained as long as they may be of service, the possibility of which terminates with the last issue of a swarm from the hive, a period appreciated by the instinct of the workers, they are then driven forth, but it is in dispute whether the workers destroy them, or whether their destruction is effected by exposure and hunger, or by the natural limitation of their lives, for although their tongues are formed upon the same type as that of the worker, it is considerably less developed, and appears to be adapted only to obtain nutriment from the honey already collected in the cells, as they seem even deficient in the instinct to gather it for themselves from flowers, never being observed to visit them.