or the supply of stores is arrested, the old and worn-out members of the hive are exterminated, breeding is stopped, the unborn young are torn from their cradle-cells and destroyed, so that there may be as few mouths as possible to fill in the lean days to come. The signs of dawning prosperity or adversity are watched for, and the working population of the hive is either increased or checked, just as future probabilities seem to indicate. But the most bewildering, most uncanny thing of all about this bee-republic is the fact that, in it, has been successfully solved the problem of the balance of the sexes. While all other creatures in the universe bring forth their kind, male and female, in what seems a haphazard, unpremeditated way, these mysterious hive-people cause their queen-mother to give them either sons or daughters according to the needs of the community. They lead her to the drone-cells, and she forthwith deposits eggs that hatch out infallibly as drones; and in the combs specially made wherein to rear the aborted females, the workers, the queen is caused to lay eggs that just as assuredly produce only the worker-bee. It is the oldest civilisation in the world, this wonderful commonwealth of the bee-people, and it is not unprofitable to examine it in the light of ideas which are at present only flickering up uncertainly on the distant path, but which might well broaden out some day into general conflagration. It is conceivable that a time existed when the conditions of bee-life were very different from those we see to-day. Bees have drawn together into vast communities, just as men are slowly, but surely, gathering into cities. A time may come when individual existence outside the city may be as impracticable for men, as life has become for separate bee-families away from the hive; and then there may arise a purely masculine dilemma. It may be that once the magnificent drone was of real consequence in domestic affairs. Bee-life may have consisted of numberless small families, each with its deep-voiced, ponderous father-bee, its fruitful mother, and its tribe of youngsters growing up, and in time setting forth to establish homes for themselves. There is no reason why each one of the thirty or forty thousand pinched virgins in a hive should not have become a fully developed, prolific queen-bee, if only the right food, in sufficient quantity, had been given her in her larval state. But the need for the single large community arose. The system of a single national mother was instituted. The great renunciation was made, for good or ill. And then the trouble, from the masculine point of view, began.