>J. Waggle wrote:
>>Drones & DCA - the nearer the better!
>>http://www.springerlink.com/content/k4503054483137v5/
Peter L. Borst <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>Basically, this proves drones are lazy, which we already knew.
I recalled this most offending remark made towards the defenseless Drone
while working on a project. Standing to defend the Drone which nature has
not equipped with the means to defend itself from such attacks;
I post this paragraph from a most excellent article of it's time appearing
in 1843, titled ‘The Bee.’
The author relies heavily on Bevan’s book ‘The honey bee; its natural
history, physiology, and management (1827) which was popular at the time.
“The drones or males are at once her majesty's nobles and husbands,
dividing with her the administrative care of the State, the official
trusts, and the parental functions. They are the office-holders and
politicians; having, in general, little to do but to buz about royalty,
pay their court, eat the fat and the sweat of the land, and talk politics.
Their number varies with the strength of the hive, from fifteen hundred to
two thousand, They seem to be, for nobles and husbands, rather unwarlike;
for they possess no stings. On the whole, as they neither fight nor work,
but only make love, they must have rather an easy time of it. Still, as we
do not choose to injure any body's character, we feel bound to say that,
if they mix not in the ordinary tasks of the operative Bees, it is the
fault of nature, and not theirs: for she has furnished them with neither
the sort of trowel to the jaws, with which the workers manage the wax, nor
the baskets to the legs, in which they collect their fragrant spoil from
the flowers. They labor not, then, because they have higher functions to
perform, of a far loftier consequence to the public weal. And their wise
and just fellow-citizens, content that each order in the State should
discharge its appropriate duty, murmur not, nor stigmatize them as non-
producers, nor rail nor roar at them us aristocrats; but recognize their
utility in the peculiar part which has been assigned them of the public
business, and submit with cheerfulness to their exemption from inferior
tasks, inappropriate as well as impossible to these general fathers of the
Bee people.” - (‘The Bee’, 1843)
Best Wishes,
Joe Waggle ~ Historical Honeybee Articles
http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/HistoricalHoneybeeArticles
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