The single large bee, which all knew to exist in each hive, was generally looked upon as the absolute ruler of the community. It is variously described as a king or queen by writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, but only in the sense of a governor; and the word chosen largely depended on the sex of the august person who happened to occupy the English throne at the time. Thus Rusden very wisely discarded the notion of a queen-bee when he had to deal with Charles the Second. Butler, perhaps the most learned of the mediæval writers on the honey-bee, as astutely forbore to mention the word king, his book being published in the reign of Queen Anne. He calls it “The Feminine Monarchie,” but seems to have no more suspected the truth that the large bee was really the mother of the whole colony than any of his predecessors. Almost alone in his day, however, he refuses to accept the flower theory of bee-generation, and asserts that the worker-bees and drones are the females and males respectively. But, he says, they “engender not as other living creatures; onely they suffer their Drones among them for a season, by whose Masculine virtue they strangely conceive and breed for the preservation of their sweet kinde.” He gets over the difficulty of there being no drones in the hive for nine months in the year, during part of which time breeding goes actively forward, by asserting that the worker-bees immaculately conceive of the drones for the season, their summer impregnation sufficing until the drones reappear in the May of the following year. Thus, without guessing it, he was very near the discovery of one of the most astounding facts in Nature—that the queen-bee of a hive, after a single traffic with a drone, continues to produce fertile eggs for the rest of her life, which may extend to as long as three, or even four, years. Butler’s book is rich in the quaint bee-lore of his times. He tells us the queen-bee has under her “subordinate Gouvernours and Leaders. For difference from the rest they beare for their crest a tuft or tossel, in some coloured yellow, in some murrey, in manner of a plume; whereof some turne downward like an Ostrich-feather, others stand upright like a Hern-top. In less than a quarter of an hour,” he assures us, “you may see three or foure of them come forth of a good stall; but chiefly in Gemini, before their continuall labour have worne these ornaments.” And any warm spring or summer morning, if you watch a hive of bees at work, you may chance upon much the same thing. In some flowers, notably the evening primrose, the pollen-grains have a way of clinging together in threads; and these festoons often catch in the antennæ of the foraging bees, giving much the same appearance of a plume, or tassel, as Butler saw in his day. [Picture: A page from Butler’s “Bees Madrigall” 1623]