She is pointed out to the gaping novice as she travels her unceasing round of the brood-combs, and her various attributes are explained to him. He is shown how much larger she is than the worker-bee; how her bodily structure differs in a dozen important ways; how her instincts and habits resemble those of the common worker hardly in a single particular. Finally he is told something at which the most polite credulity may well demur. Although the mother-bee is to all appearances of a totally different race, the egg from which she was raised was identical with that which produces the little worker. Her bodily size, the change in the number and shape of her organs, her mental differences, are all due to treatment and diet alone. There is no reason why she should not have been an ordinary neuter working-bee, nor why any one of the thirty or forty thousand little workers in a hive should not have become a great queen-bee, the sole mother of an entire colony, save for the edict of the communal mind. More wonderful still, the drones, the male bees—the brothers, never the fathers, of their own hive, as has been so often stated—owe the fact of their sex entirely to the will or whim of the hive authorities, working through the docile agency of the queen. Until the moment before the egg is laid, the question of the sex of the resulting bee is held in abeyance. This big lusty drone, with exuberant masculinity obvious in every posture and act; his totally different organism; his incapacity for anything else than the fulfilment of the one office required of him, for he cannot even entirely feed himself; his habit of spending his life either in a comfortable lethargy of repletion at home, or in amorous knight-errantry abroad—this drone might have been a little plodding worker-bee, with shrunken yet elaborated body and curiously developed brain, whose one idea in life is to get through the largest amount of work before death claims her, and who is armed with a formidable poisoned sting, while the drone has none.