Those among our own race who profess to hail the prospect of a time when parthenogenesis shall be the normal mode of reproduction may well take the Ant as an awful warning. Their ambitions may overreach the mark. The poor queen becomes a slave to reproduction; children in myriads are born to her; even if she would she could not sustain her interest in them, she could not even recognize them as the fruit of her body. Her daughters are born to a lifelong drudgery, her sons are mere fertilizing agents: for their only purpose in life is to perpetuate this awful thraldom, this appalling prolificness; and having accomplished this, they die forthwith. If there be any joy in this life it is drunk by the males alone. Thus does the female rule overreach itself. It is well, indeed, that the participants of the joyous nuptial flights dancing deliriously on gauzy wings in the glare of a summer day, have no foreknowledge of the long night that is to follow. Unlike the Bees, the Ants may produce as many as five grades of workers, each of which have different duties towards the community. But the nature of those duties and the manner of the evolution of these types, are themes foreign to these pages: enough has been said already to indicate the nature of the problems they present when discussing the life-history of the Bees. The subject of parthenogenesis need be pursued no further in this volume than is sufficient to bring out its retrograde character. It is a form of reproduction which may be limited to a small number of generations, as with the Aphides, or to a single generation alternating with normal sexual generations, as in many Cynipidæ or Gall-flies, or it may be the only mode of reproduction, as in some other Gall-flies, some Saw-flies and some Crustacea, wherein no males have ever been seen. In some species this form of reproduction gives rise to females only—the Thelyotokous parthenogenesis of scientific text-books—as in the Saw-flies and Gall-flies, and the parasitic _Tomognatbous_. In some other Saw-flies, unfertilized queens and workers of Ants, Bees, and Wasps, which occasionally produce offspring, the progeny is always male, and this is known as Arrhenotokous parthenogenesis. In one or two species of Saw-fly, _e.g._ _Nematus curtispina_, both males and females may be produced, when the species is said to be Deuterotokous.