The tendency to be unduly scientific, to meet these things with exact and unimaginative interest, receives its final quietus here. For he who realises the whole deadly efficacy of the honey-bee’s sting cannot logically pass it by as a mere remarkable provision of nature, praising God for it complacently, but must concede it a much wider significance. This complicated weapon of the stunted, sex-perverted worker-bee owes its existence as much to deliberate art as to nature, or those who watch the Omnipotent in hive-life are strangely and perversely led astray. In the queen-mother, whose physical organism may be said to be comparatively unchanged from its aboriginal type, we see the part corresponding to the worker’s sting, essentially another creation. The queen’s ovipositor is longer; it is curved; the barbs upon it are small and insignificant; the fluid in the secreting-gland is no poison at all, but a thick opaque substance, whose true use is probably to glue the eggs safely to the bottoms of the cells. She is also provided with a pair of blunt instruments covered with sensitive hairs, which serve, with the ovipositor, to guide the egg securely to its destination. The worker-bee has these feelers on either side of her sting, but she has perverted them to a very different office, that of seeking out the vulnerable parts of her enemy. And what a drastic change her will, or that of her foster-mothers, has wrought in the whole contrivance! She has bartered the privilege of motherhood and years of life for a few short months and a share in the communal sovereignty. She must be ready to further the well-being of the hive by the art of war as well as by the arts of peace. Therefore she has deliberately helped in fashioning the ploughshares into cannon. A little change in her food as a nursling, an infinitesimal leaking from a gland that takes the full power of the strongest glass to see,—and, with all the other multitudinous changes of form and character, this last miracle comes quietly into being. The egg-depositing shaft grows short and straight; its moderate indentations become cruel jagged barbs designed to hold as well as to kill; the harmless, egg-fastening gluten is quickened into a virulent poison; and the death-dealing thing is ready and ripe for service against all honey-lovers, the hereditary foes of the hive. CHAPTER XI THE MYSTERY OF THE SWARM