As a typical instance of a sluggard and idler, the drone-bee has enjoyed a vogue in the preparatory-school books for ages past. But, whatever his primæval equipment for usefulness may have been, it is evident now that he could not labour if he would. Physically, in all points but that of muscle, as well as mentally, he has become degraded to the inferior of the worker-bee in every way. He is destitute of all those special contrivances with which she is so amply furnished. He has no baskets for pollen-carrying, nor any of the ingenious brushes and combs which she uses to scrape the pollen from herself and others. He has neither wax-generating organs, nor leg-pincers to deal with wax. His tongue is too short for honey-getting. His brain is much smaller than even that of the feeble-minded queen. The intricate gland-systems, which play so important a role in the daily life of the worker, are either completely atrophied in the drone or exist only in an elementary state. While it has been the communal will of the hive that the worker-bee should develop an amazing proficiency of mind and body, the same forces have been steadily at work to degrade the male-bee into a creature of dependence, gradually training out of him all initiative and idea, except in the one direction. Just as in the case of the queen and the worker, drone and worker-bee seem hardly to belong to the same race. And yet, for all his frank incapabilities and lack of ideals, the drone offers, in one respect, a refreshing contrast to his sour, stern, duty-worshipping sister. He is a life-long, incorrigible optimist. He fiddles gaily while the city burns. All his misery and mourning would not serve to quench a single spark of it; so he eats, drinks, and is merry, with the intuition of all drones that Nemesis waits on the morrow with something disagreeable. It is impossible to study his ways for long without recognising the spirit of rude jollity and horse-play that thoroughly pervades all he does. In and out of the hive he blusters, cannoning roughly against all he meets, and raising his burly, bullying song in the air as a sort of protest against all this anxious industry going on about him. Once gone from the neighbourhood of the hive, he seems to keep incessantly on the wing until hunger prompts him home again. For no one has ever seen a drone-bee among the insects that haunt the flowers, nor ever seen him basking on a sunlit wall or tree-trunk, after the kind of almost every other winged atom in the universe.