The reluctance of queens to eject their stings, led Pliny and others to imagine that they did not possess any. Their extreme caution in this respect, and the fatal consequences usually attending a departure from it, gave birth to the following jeux d'esprit. In consequence of Pope Urban the Eighth being suspected of a stronger attachment to the French than to the Spaniards, a Frenchman who had observed _three bees_ quartered upon his arms, wrote this Latin verse. "Gallis mella dabunt, Hispanis spicula figent." To this a Spaniard is said to have subjoined, "Spicula si figant, emorientur apes." To close the series, and to show his universal paternal regard towards his flock, Pope Urban is made to add the following distich: "Cunctis mella dabunt, et nullis spicula figent, Spicula rex[M] etenim figere nescit apum." [Footnote M: The ancients supposed the sovereign of the bees to be a male.] This _caution of the queens_ is never more conspicuously evinced than _in their combats with each other_, for they instantly separate if there be any danger of _mutual_ destruction from the darting forth of their stings. +Huber+ gives a striking instance of this. Two queens in one of his hives having left their cells at nearly the same instant, rushed together with great apparent fury. The antennæ of each were seized by the teeth of the other, and the head, breast, and belly of both were mutually opposed. Finding themselves however thus dangerously situated, and their curved extremities on the point of meeting, each disengaged itself and flew away; when the other bees, who had before receded, to make a clear arena for the combatants, drove them together again. This was done repeatedly, till at last the stronger queen, seizing the other's wing, and curling her extremities under her belly, inflicted a mortal sting. I think this observation of Huber puts a negative upon Dr. Evans's last question, and to assent to his first would I apprehend raise her majesty too high in the scale of existence. I believe we must here, as in many other similar cases, acknowledge our ignorance, and refer the proceeding to instinct. We have seen that where there is more than one native queen in a hive, there is always a combat between them, terminating in the death of all but one. It was the opinion of +Schirach+ and +Riem+, that if a stranger queen were introduced where there was a native one, the former would be assailed by the workers, and by them stung to death. The experiments of +Huber+ and +Dunbar+ discountenance this opinion: indeed Huber says that in the whole course of his experience he never knew more than one instance of a queen's being stung by a worker, and that was wholly unintentional.