steadily failing sun-glow, the generous fare is slowly withdrawn; her retinue thins and disperses; at length she becomes a solitary, unmarked wanderer again, sipping, with the commonest worker, at the plain household sweets. How the proportion of the sexes is so unerringly regulated by the hive-authorities through their influence on the mother-bee, is not so readily explained; nor can it be at present more than shrewd conjecture, a backward reckoning from effect to cause. Probably the opening or closing of the fertilising gland, which decides the sex of the egg, is automatic, the attitude of the mother-bee during oviposition determining its action. When she enters the narrow worker-cells, her body is necessarily straightened, and this may produce pressure on the fecundating gland, resulting in the impregnation of the egg. But in the wider drone-cell no such constricted posture is needful, and the egg may therefore pass untouched by the fructifying germ. If this version of the matter be accepted, the natural inference is that either the mother-bee is incapable of laying female eggs in the cells specially constructed for raising queens—these being the largest of all,—or that there is something in the peculiar curve of the cell-cup which compels her to straighten her body in the act, and so brings about the same posture as with the narrow worker-cells. This theory, although at present the most plausible, has received, it is true, little confirmation in fact. No one, apparently, has ever seen the mother-bee lay in a queen-cell, nor has the transportation thither of a worker-egg by the bees actually been witnessed. To cling to the old idea of the supremacy of the queen-bee, giving her the power and ability of a despotic, all-wise sovereign, would, of course, set this and many other vexed questions at rest. Nothing, however marvellous, would be too much to expect of her. But the farther the student of bee-life goes in his absorbing subject, the more impossible the old notion seems. Proof comes to him with every hour that the mother-bee is virtually a servant, and never a ruler in the hive; and just as assured testimony reaches him of the universal potency of the worker-bees. All else that takes place within the hive is brought about by their collective will and agency; and it would be strange indeed if this vital matter of progeneration were not subject to the same controlling force. CHAPTER IX THE SOVEREIGN WORKER-BEE WATCHING the inner life of the hive in the season of its full activity, it is not the untiring spirit of industry pervading the whole bee-commonwealth that most excites the student’s wonder, but rather the fact that this ceaseless diligence finds so many outlets—that so many different kinds of necessary work are going forward at one and the same time.