While the queen-bee’s natural element is the obscurity of the hive, and she would seem both to hate and fear the sunshine, the worker is essentially an outdoor creature, revelling in the light and air. While the queen, though obedient to the destiny that has made her over-fruitful, displays nevertheless not the slightest joy of motherhood nor interest in her children, the worker, doomed to eternal spinsterhood, yet constitutes herself the true mother and nurse and instructress of all the young in the hive. And the price exacted for the authority and power which she usurps, or was usurped for her by those remote ancestors of hers who first invented the sexless honey-bee, must be paid in the hardest coin—that of life itself. Instead of the years that nature allotted to her kind in the beginning, she is to endure hardly as many months. Destiny, and her own vaulting ambitions, have given her too arduous a part to play. Her stunted, yet over-elaborated body and over-developed brain, cannot long hold out against the wear and tear of the life she is born to. At best a few months see her dead at her work, or using the last pulsations of her worn-out, ragged wings to carry her away to the traditional burial-place of the hive; or her end may be to fall under the stroke of the State executioners. For the old-age problem has long ago discovered its effective solution in the bee-republic. Justice that is capable of being tempered with mercy carries its own mark of imperfection indelibly upon it. When the principle of all for the common good has been driven to its last resort in logic, mercy to the individual can only be another name for robbing Peter to pay Paul. In bee-communism the sole title to life is utility, and so the old worn-out, useless workers must go. The development of the worker-egg through its various stages of growth, until the perfectly formed insect emerges from the cell, makes a curious study. The egg itself is remarkable, for it is covered with an hexagonal pattern. The large compound eyes of the fully grown bee also show this form. Each eye consists of about four thousand separate lenses, and each lens is a regular hexagon. Wonder has often been expressed at the ingenuity of the comb-builders in making the cells six-sided, and thus crowding into a given space more compartments than could be secured by the same amount of material wrought into any other shape. The ancient writers explained this choice of the hexagonal cell by the supposed fact that the six legs of the bee were simultaneously employed in comb-building, each leg constructing its own portion of the cell. A more modern idea is that the particular shape of the cell is accidental, or rather the outcome of compelling circumstance, mutual pressure causing the cells to assume the hexagonal form.