The bee-massacre takes place in July; when accordingly all our nobility
and gentry would be out of town, with a vengeance! The women would draw
their swords, and hunt and stab them all about the West end, till
Brompton and Bayswater would be choked with slain.

Thirdly, her Majesty the Queen would either succeed to a quiet throne,
or, if manufactured, would have to eat a prodigious quantity of jelly in
her infancy; and so alter growing into proper sovereign condition, would
issue forth, and begin her reign either with killing her royal sisters,
or leading forth a colony to America or New South Wales. She would then
take to husband some noble lord for the space of one calendar hour, and
dismissing him to his dullness, proceed to lie in of 12,000 little royal
highnesses in the course of the eight following weeks, with others too
numerous to mention; all which princely generation with little
exception, would forthwith give up their title, and divide themselves
into lords or working-women as it happened; and so the story would go
round to the end of the chapter, bustling, working, and massacring:--and
here ends the sage example of the Monarchy of the Bees.

We must observe nevertheless, before we conclude, that however ill and
tragical the example of the bees may look for human imitation, we are
not to suppose that the fact is anything like so melancholy to
themselves. Perhaps it is no evil at all, or only so for the moment. The
drones, it is true, seem to have no fancy for being massacred; but we
have no reason to suppose, that they, or any of the rest concerned in
this extraordinary instinct, are aware of the matter beforehand; and the
same is to be said of the combats between the Queen-bees; they appear to
be the result of an irresistible impulse, brought about, by the sudden
pressure of a necessity. Bees appear to be very happy, during far the
greater portion of their existence. A modern writer, of whom it is to be