removes the spine which has remained in her belly, and cleans the place with lustral attention. Then she enters the second period of her life: maternity. This penis which remains fast in the vagina makes one think of the darts of fighters which also remain in the wound; be it love or war the over-courageous beastlet expires, worn out and mutilated; there is in this a peculiar facility of dehiscence which seems very rare. The wedding of the queen bee remained a long time absolutely mysterious, and even today there are only a very few observers who have been the distant witnesses of it. Réaumur, having isolated a queen and a male, witnessed a play or combat with movements which he interpreted with ingenuity. He could not see the actual coupling, which only takes place in the air. His story, is unique and nothing since has confirmed it. He shows us a queen approaching a male, sucking him with her proboscis, offering him honey, stroking him with her feet, and finally irritated by the coldness of her suitor, mounting his back, applying her vulva to the male organ, which Réaumur describes very well ("Memoirs," tome V) and which he represents as covered with a white viscous liquid. The real preludes, at least in a state of liberty, contradict the great observer. The female seems in no way aggressive. Here are the three authentic accounts I have been able to discover: "6th July, 1849, M. Hannemann, bee-keeper at Wurtemburg, Thuringia was seated near my hive when his attention was aroused by an unaccustomed buzzing. Suddenly he saw thirty or forty drones" (i.e., false drones, male bees) "rapidly pursuing a queen-bee, about twenty or thirty feet up in the air. The group filled a space about two feet in diameter. Sometimes, in their flight, they came as low as ten feet from the ground, then rose, flying north to south. He followed them about a hundred yards, then a building interrupted him. The group of drones formed a sort of cone with the queen at the summit, then the cone enlarged into a globe of which she was the centre: at this moment the queen succeeded in getting away and rose vertically, still followed by the drones who had reformed the cone under her."[1] "Some years later the Rev. Millette, at Witemarsh, observed the final phase of the act. During a hiving, he noticed a flying queen, who an instant later, was stopped by a male. After having flown about a rod they fell to the ground hooked to each other. He approached and captured them both, at the very moment when the male had abandoned himself to the embrace; he carried them to the house and let them loose in a closed room. The queen, angry, flew toward the window; the male after dragging himself for an instant across the open palm of the observer's hand, fell to floor and died. Both male and female had at the tip of the abdomen drops of a milky white liquid; by squeezing the male, he saw that the male had lost his genital organs." (Farmer and Gardener, 1859.)