WHAT IS MAN? AND OTHER ESSAYS OF MARK TWAIN

elect a queen that has more sense.

There are always a few royal heirs in stock and ready to

take her place–ready and more than anxious to do it, although

she is their own mother. These girls are kept by themselves, and

are regally fed and tended from birth. No other bees get such

fine food as they get, or live such a high and luxurious life.

By consequence they are larger and longer and sleeker than their

working sisters. And they have a curved sting, shaped like a

scimitar, while the others have a straight one.

A common bee will sting any one or anybody, but a royalty

stings royalties only. A common bee will sting and kill another

common bee, for cause, but when it is necessary to kill the queen

other ways are employed. When a queen has grown old and slack

and does not lay eggs enough one of her royal daughters is

allowed to come to attack her, the rest of the bees looking on at

the duel and seeing fair play. It is a duel with the curved

stings. If one of the fighters gets hard pressed and gives it up

and runs, she is brought back and must try again–once, maybe

twice; then, if she runs yet once more for her life, judicial

death is her portion; her children pack themselves into a ball

around her person and hold her in that compact grip two or three

days, until she starves to death or is suffocated. Meantime the

victor bee is receiving royal honors and performing the one royal

function–laying eggs.

As regards the ethics of the judicial assassination of the

queen, that is a matter of politics, and will be discussed later,

in its proper place.

During substantially the whole of her short life of five or

six years the queen lives in Egyptian darkness and stately

seclusion of the royal apartments, with none about her but

plebeian servants, who give her empty lip-affection in place of

the love which her heart hungers for; who spy upon her in the

interest of her waiting heirs, and report and exaggerate her

defects and deficiencies to them; who fawn upon her and flatter

her to her face and slander her behind her back; who grovel

before her in the day of her power and forsake her in her age and

weakness. There she sits, friendless, upon her throne through

the long night of her life, cut off from the consoling sympathies

and sweet companionship and loving endearments which she craves,

by the gilded barriers of her awful rank; a forlorn exile in her

own house and home, weary object of formal ceremonies and

machine-made worship, winged child of the sun, native to the free

air and the blue skies and the flowery fields, doomed by the

splendid accident of her birth to trade this priceless heritage

for a black captivity, a tinsel grandeur, and a loveless life,

with shame and insult at the end and a cruel death–and condemned

by the human instinct in her to hold the bargain valuable!

Huber, Lubbock, Maeterlinck–in fact, all the great

authorities–are agreed in denying that the bee is a member of

the human family. I do not know why they have done this, but I

think it is from dishonest motives. Why, the innumerable facts

brought to light by their own painstaking and exhaustive

experiments prove that if there is a master fool in the world, it

is the bee. That seems to settle it.

But that is the way of the scientist. He will spend thirty

years in building up a mountain range of facts with the intent to

prove a certain theory; then he is so happy in his achievement

that as a rule he overlooks the main chief fact of all–that his

accumulation proves an entirely different thing. When you point

out this miscarriage to him he does not answer your letters; when

you call to convince him, the servant prevaricates and you do not

get in. Scientists have odious manners, except when you prop up

their theory; then you can borrow money of them.

To be strictly fair, I will concede that now and then one of

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