If the story of the honey-bee’s anatomy has everywhere some of the elements of romance about it—in its unexpected incidents, its adventurous colour, its shadow of a great design—this spirit suffers no abatement when we come, in a last view of it, to consider her as one carrying arms, one bearing such a weapon of offence as never came into human mind to fashion. The long curved scimitar of the queen, which she cherishes so carefully that nothing will induce her to strike with it except when it is to be turned against a royal foe, is otherwise little else than a harmless piece of domestic furniture. But the sting of the valorous worker-bee, seen under a microscope, is a positively terrifying engine of destruction. Popular science generally describes it as a sheath containing a barbed and poisonous dart; and the trite comparison is always made of the bee’s sting with the finest sewing-needle, the latter being likened to a rough bar of iron. The idea of a sheath is pure fiction, as a little painstaking examination will soon reveal. The bee’s sting is made up of three separate lances, each with a barbed edge, and each capable of being thrust forward independently of the others. The central and broader lance has a hollow face, furnished at each side with a rail, or beading, which runs its whole length. On the back of each of the other two lances there is a longitudinal groove, and into these grooves fit the raised beadings of the central lancet. Thus the sting is like a sword with three blades—united, but sliding upon one another—the barbed points of which continue to advance alternately into the wound, going ever deeper and deeper of their own malice aforethought after the initial thrust is made. It is a device of war, compared to which the explosive bullet is but a clumsy brutality. Yet this is not all. To make its death-dealing powers doubly sure, this thorough-minded amazon must fill the haft of her triple blade with a subtle poison, and so contrive its sliding mechanism that the same impulse, which drives the points successively forward, drenches the whole weapon with a fatal juice.