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There are numberless instances of the absolute attachment and devotion that the workers display towards their queen.  Should disaster befall the little republic; should the hive or the comb collapse, should man prove ignorant, or brutal; should they suffer from famine, from cold or disease, and perish by thousands, it will still be almost invariably found that the queen will be safe and alive, beneath the corpses of her faithful daughters.  For they will protect her, help her to escape; their bodies will provide both rampart and shelter; for her will be the last drop of honey, the wholesomest food.  And be the disaster never so great, the city of virgins will not lose heart so long as the queen be alive.  Break their comb twenty times in succession, take twenty times from them their young and their food, you still shall never succeed in making them doubt of the future; and though they be starving, and their number so small that it scarcely suffices to shield their mother from the enemy’s gaze, they will set about to reorganize the laws of the colony, and to provide for what is most pressing; they will distribute the work in accordance with the new necessities of this disastrous moment, and thereupon will immediately re-assume their labours with an ardour, a patience, a tenacity and intelligence not often to be found existing to such a degree in nature, true though it be that most of its creatures display more confidence and courage than man.

But the presence of the queen is not even essential for their discouragement to vanish and their love to endure.  It is enough that she should have left, at the moment of her death or departure, the very slenderest hope of descendants.  “We have seen a colony,” says Langstroth, one of the fathers of modern apiculture, “that had not bees sufficient to cover a comb of three inches square, and yet endeavoured to rear a queen.  For two whole weeks did they cherish this hope; finally, when their number was reduced by one-half, their queen was born, but her wings were imperfect, and she was unable to fly.  Impotent as she was, her bees did not treat her with the less respect.  A week more, and there remained hardly a dozen bees; yet a few days, and the queen had vanished, leaving a few wretched, inconsolable insects upon the combs.”

There is another instance, and one that reveals most palpably the ultimate gesture of filial love and devotion.  It arises from one of the extraordinary ordeals that our recent and tyrannical intervention inflicts on these hapless, unflinching heroines.  I, in common with all amateur bee-keepers, have more than once had impregnated queens sent me from Italy; for the Italian species is more prolific, stronger, more active, and gentler than our own.  It is the custom to forward them in small, perforated boxes.  In these some food is placed, and the queen enclosed, together with a certain number of workers, selected as far as possible from among the oldest bees in the hive. (The age of