But now a new tragedy is about to be enacted. The drones, that is to say, the males, are now no longer wanted in the colony: their mission is over. By an inexorable law of Nature they must be got rid of, and the working bees proceed to make general massacre of them. It is in the months of July and August that this frightful carnage takes place. The workers may be seen furiously giving chase to the males, and pursuing them to the extremity of the hive, where these unfortunate insects seek a place of safety. Three or four workers dash off in the pursuit after a male. They seize hold of him, pull him by his legs, by his wings, by his antennæ, and kill him with their stings. This pitiless massacre includes even the larvæ and pupæ of the males. The executioners drag them from their cells, run them through with their stings, greedily suck the liquids contained in their bodies, and then cast their remains to the winds. This slaughter goes on for many days, continuing till the males have been completely got rid of, they not being able to defend themselves, as they have no stings. They are allowed to live, however, when they are fortunate enough to inhabit a hive deprived of its queen. There they even find a place of perfect safety when they have been driven out of another hive, and may be met with in this refuge until the month of January. In like manner the lives of the males are spared in those hives which, instead of a true queen, have only a female half impregnated, which lays only male eggs; but a hive of this kind, whose active population cannot be increased, ends by being abandoned by its inhabitants. The sterility or absence of the queen entails the dissolution of the society. She is, in fact, the life and soul of the hive; and without her there is no hope, no courage, no activity. The populace, abandoned to itself, falls into anarchy. Famine, pillage, ruin, and death are at its doors. Having no progeny to set their hopes on, the bees live from one day to another without a care for the morrow. They leave off working, and live entirely on theft and rapine, and at last they disappear entirely. It is a society become rotten and broken up for the want of a moral tie.