Page:The life of the bee (IA cu31924101469827).pdf/113

The Swarm a queen; nor will a queen ever draw hers on a man, an animal, or an ordinary bee. She will never unsheath her royal weapon—curved, in scimeter fashion, instead of being straight, like that of the ordinary bee—save only in the case of her doing battle with an equal: in other words, with a sister queen.

No bee, it would seem, dare take on herself the horror of direct and bloody regicide. Whenever, therefore, the good order and prosperity of the republic appear to demand that a queen shall die, they endeavour to give to her death some semblance of natural decease, and by infinite subdivision of the crime, to render it almost anonymous.

They will, therefore, to use the picturesque expression of the apiarist, "ball" the queenly intruder; in other words, they will entirely surround her with their innumerable interlaced bodies. They will 101