We will now, in order to simplify matters, return to the queen whom the bees have permitted to slaughter her sisters, and resume the account of her adventures.  As I have already stated, this massacre will be often prevented, and often sanctioned, at times even when the bees apparently do not intend to issue a second swarm; for we notice the same diversity of political spirit in the different hives of an apiary as in the different human nations of a continent.  But it is clear that the bees will act imprudently in giving their consent; for if the queen should die, or stray in the nuptial flight, it will be impossible to fill her place, the workers’ larvae having passed the age when they are susceptible of royal transformation.  Let us assume, however, that the imprudence has been committed; and behold our first-born, therefore, unique sovereign, and recognised as such in the spirit of her people.  But she is still a virgin.  To become as was the mother before her, it is essential that she should meet the male within the first twenty days of her life.  Should the event for some reason be delayed beyond this period, her virginity becomes irrevocable.  And yet we have seen that she is not sterile, virgin though she be.  There confronts us here the great mystery—­or precaution—­of Nature, that is known as parthenogenesis, and is common to a certain number of insects, such as the aphides, the lepidoptera of the Psyche genus, the hymenoptera of the Cynipede family, etc.  The virgin queen is able to lay; but from all the eggs that she will deposit in the cells, be these large or small, there will issue males alone; and as these never work, as they live at the expense of the females, as they never go foraging except on their own account, and are generally incapable of providing for their subsistence, the result will be, at the end of some weeks, that the last exhausted worker will perish, and the colony be ruined and totally annihilated.  The queen, we have said, will produce thousands of drones; and each of these will possess millions of the spermatozoa whereof it is impossible that a single one can have penetrated into the organism of the mother.  That may not be more astounding, perhaps, than a thousand other and analogous phenomena; and, indeed, when we consider these problems, and more especially those of generation, the marvellous and the unexpected confront us so constantly—­occurring far more frequently, and above all in far less human fashion, than in the most miraculous fairy stories—­that after a time astonishment becomes so habitual with us that we almost cease to wonder.  The fact, however, is sufficiently curious to be worthy of notice.  But, on the other hand, how shall we explain to ourselves the aim that nature can have in thus favouring the valueless drones at the cost of the workers who are so essential?  Is she afraid lest the females might perhaps be induced by their intellect unduly to limit the number of their parasites, which, destructive