yet her eyes and olfactory organs are like the eyes and organs of the infirm, compared with those of the male.  Were the drones almost blind, had they only the most rudimentary sense of smell, they scarcely would suffer.  They have nothing to do, no prey to hunt down; their food is brought to them ready prepared, and their existence is spent in the obscurity of the hive, lapping honey from the comb.  But they are the agents of love; and the most enormous, most useless gifts are flung with both hands into the abyss of the future.  Out of a thousand of them, one only, once in his life, will have to seek, in the depths of the azure, the presence of the royal virgin.  Out of a thousand one only will have, for one instant, to follow in space the female who desires not to escape.  That suffices.  The partial power flings open her treasury, wildly, even deliriously.  To every one of these unlikely lovers, of whom nine hundred and ninety-nine will be put to death a few days after the fatal nuptials of the thousandth, she has given thirteen thousand eyes on each side of their head, while the worker has only six thousand.  According to Cheshire’s calculations, she has provided each of their antennae with thirty-seven thousand eight hundred olfactory cavities, while the worker has only five thousand in both.  There we have an instance of the almost universal disproportion that exists between the gifts she rains upon love and her niggardly doles to labour; between the favours she accords to what shall, in an ecstasy, create new life, and the indifference wherewith she regards what will patiently have to maintain itself by toil.  Whoever would seek faithfully to depict the character of nature, in accordance with the traits we discover here, would design an extraordinary figure, very foreign to our ideal, which nevertheless can only emanate from her.  But too many things are unknown to man for him to essay such a portrait, wherein all would be deep shadow save one or two points of flickering light.

[84]

Very few, I imagine, have profaned the secret of the queen-bee’s wedding, which comes to pass in the infinite, radiant circles of a beautiful sky.  But we are able to witness the hesitating departure of the bride-elect and the murderous return of the bride.

However great her impatience, she will yet choose her day and her hour, and linger in the shadow of the portal till a marvellous morning fling open wide the nuptial spaces in the depths of the great azure vault.  She loves the moment when drops of dew still moisten the leaves and the flowers, when the last fragrance of dying dawn still wrestles with burning day, like a maiden caught in the arms of a heavy warrior; when through the silence of approaching noon is heard, once and again, a transparent cry that has lingered from sunrise.

Then she appears on the threshold—­in the midst of indifferent foragers, if she have left sisters in the hive; or surrounded by a delirious throng of workers, should it be impossible to fill her place.