"Having seen the queen go out, M. Carrey closed the entrance of the hive. During his absence, which lasted a quarter of an hour, three false-drones came to the entrance and finding it closed, continued flying. When the queen on her return was only about three feet from the hive, one of the drones flew very rapidly toward her, throwing his legs around her body. They stopped, resting on a long grass-blade. Then an explosion was distinctly heard, and they separated. The drone fell to the ground quite dead, with abdomen much contracted. After a few circles in the air, the mother entered the hive." (Copulation of the mother bee, in l'Apiculteur, 6e année, 1862.) Save the remark about the final explosion, these three accounts accord well enough, and give an exact idea of one of the couplings most difficult to get sight of. It is, moreover, the one half-obscure point in bee life. One knows all the rest, their three sexes, rigorously specialized, the precise industry of the wax-workers, the diligence of the collectresses, the political sense of these extraordinary amazons, their initiatives, when the hive is too full, their starts for the formation of new swarms, the duels of queens where the populace intervene, the massacre of males as soon as they are useless, the nurse's art in transforming a vulgar larva into the larva of a queen, the methodical activity of these republics where all wills, united in a single conscience, have no other aim but the common well-being and the conservation of the race. It is however these over-mechanical virtues which constitute the inferiority of the bee; the workers are extremely laborious and well-behaved, but they lack even that slight personality which characterizes sexed insects. The much less reasonable queen is more living, she is capable of jealousy, rage, of despair when she feels her royalty menaced by the new queen whom the nurses have bred up in secret. Even the useless, noisy, pillaging, parasitic males, drunk and swollen with vain sperm are more attractive than the honest workers, and handsomer also, stronger, more slender, more elegant. Bee-lovers generally despise these musketeers, yet it is they who incarnate the animality, that is to say the beauty of the specie. If it is true as M. Maeterlinck believes (La Vie des Abeilles), that the most vigorous of seven or eight hundred males finally seduces the royal virgin, then their laziness, their greediness, their giddy staggering are but so many virtues.