bee on her ceaseless rounds and give the drones, their brothers, their daily rations of bee-milk”—what else these lazy creatures need they take for themselves from the honey-vats. But this is not all. They have to meet their older sisters returning from the fields and gardens laden with nectar. This is regurgitated and transferred to the pouches of the youngsters, by whom it is transformed into honey and stored in the combs in the upper region of the hive. At the end of about a fortnight these little drudges are allowed a brief respite, during the heat of the day, to emerge into the outer air and gather ideas on the world which is yet to be explored. Soon a measure of freedom is allowed, the indoor work ceases, and each takes up the new and more agreeable task of gathering pollen, and after a few days of this the more responsible task of gathering nectar is undertaken, which is continued till death ends one of the most crowded, surely, of existences. Such as are born near “swarming-time” may have the good fortune to take part in the exodus and the settling down in the new home, and some may taste yet other moments of excitement, but they are moments only. The worker bee knows no leisure for the improvement of her mind and morals. She needs none, for she has neither: she is a creature of routine, a living automaton apparently. Yet there are incidents in this wonderful community which seem too complex to be merely the result of instinct unaided, uninspired, by intelligence albeit of a nebulous kind. The worker-bees, it has been remarked, are barren: their reproductive organs are atrophied, and by the decree, not of the queen-mother of the hive, nor of the males, but of their own caste. In spite of the fact that they are incapable of producing offspring, they, and they alone, determine who shall undertake this task; and they decree the fate that awaits those thus appointed when they can no longer fulfil this purpose. When the queen, waxing old, and waning in fecundity, lays fewer and fewer eggs, and these only producing males, they take silent note of the fact, and at the appointed time decree the death of their Sovereign-mother. Yet they hesitate to lay violent hands on her. She, as queen, claimed the right in her early youth to slay her sister-queens, and sped them with a dagger-thrust; now her turn comes to die. But it must be a bloodless death, carried out with due ceremonial. So her daughters cluster about her, and in a mock embrace, that tightens every moment, her breath is squeezed out of her body. There are no State pensions for those who are past work, but a State execution instead. This is vastly more economical, and it may yet commend itself to some would-be social “reformers,” who will doubtless contrive to make exceptions to the rule!