[Footnote 205:  The ancients, even Aristotle, did not know that the queen bee is the common mother of the hive.  They called her the king, and it remained for Swammerdam in the seventeenth century to determine with the microscope this important fact.  From that discovery has developed our modern knowledge of the bee; that the drones are the males and are suffered by the (normally) sterile workers to live only until one of them has performed his office of fertilizing once for all the new queen in that nuptial flight, so dramatically fatal to the successful swain, which Maeterlinck has described with wonderful rhetoric, whereupon the workers massacre the surviving males without mercy.  This is the “driving out” which Varro mentions.]

[Footnote 206:  This picture of the queen bee is hardly in accord with modern observations.  It seems that while the queen is treated with the utmost respect, she is rather a royal prisoner than a ruler, and, after her nuptial flight, is confined to her function of laying eggs incessantly unless she may be unwillingly dragged forth to lead a swarm.  Maeterlinck thus pictures (La Vie des Abeilles, 174) her existence with a Gallic pencil: 

“Elle n’aura aucune des habitudes, aucunes des passions que nous croyons inherentes a l’abeille.  Elle n’eprouvera ni le desir du soleil, ni le besoin de l’espace et mourra sans avoir visite une fleur.  Elle passera son existence dans l’ombre et l’agitation de la foule a la recherche infatigable de berceaux a peupler.  En revanche, elle connaitra seule l’inquietude de l’amour.”]

[Footnote 207:  It would have interested Axius to know that the annual consumption of honey in the United States today is from 100 to 125 million pounds and that the crop has a money value of at least ten million dollars.  To match Seius, we might put forward a bee farmer in California who produces annually 150,000 pounds of honey from 2,000 hives.]

[Footnote 208:  Maeterlinck has made a charming picture of this habit of propinquity of the bee-stand to the human habitation.  He describes (La Vie des Abeilles, 14) the old man who taught him to love bees when he was a boy in Flanders, an old man whose entire happiness “consistait aux beautes d’un jardin et parmi ces beautes la mieux aimee et la plus visitees etait un roucher, compose de douze cloches de paille qu’il avait peint, les unes de rose vif, les autres de jaune clair, la plupart d’un bleu tendre, car il avail observe, bien avant les experiences de Sir John Lubbock, que le bleu est la couleur preferee des abeilles.  Il avait installe ce roucher centre le mur blanchi de la maison, dans l’angle que formait une des ces savoureuses et fraiches cuisines hollondaises aux dressoirs de faience ou etincalaient les etains et les cuivres qui, par la porte ouverte, se refletaient dans un canal paisible.  Et l’eau charges d’images familieres, sous un rideau de peupliers, guidait les regards jusqu’au repos d’un horizon de moulins et de pres.”]