iii. The body of the Workers is oblong.
The head triangular. The mandibles are prominent, so as to terminate the head in an angle, toothless and forcipate. The tongue and maxillæ are long and incurved: the labrum and antennæ black.
In the trunk the tegulæ are black. The wings extend only to the apex of the fourth segment of the abdomen. The legs are all black, with the digits only rather piceous. The posterior tibiæ are naked above, exteriorly longitudinally concave, and interiorly longitudinally convex; furnished with lateral and recumbent hairs to form the corbicula, and armed at the end with the pecten. The upper surface of the posterior plantæ resembles that of the tibiæ; underneath they are furnished with a scopula or brush of stiff hairs set in rows: at the base they are armed with stiff bristles, and exteriorly with an acute appendage or auricle.
The abdomen is a little longer than the head and trunk together; oblong, and rather heart-shaped—a transverse section of it is triangular. It is covered with longish flavo-pallid hairs: the first segment is short with longer hairs; the base of the three intermediate segments is covered, and as it were banded, with pale hairs. The apex of the three intermediate ventral segments is rather fulvescent, and their base is distinguished on each side by a trapeziform wax-pocket covered by a thin membrane. The sting, or rather vagina of the spicula, is straight.
[136] Reaumur, v. 375.
[137] Virgil seems to have regarded the drone as one of the sorts of kings or leaders of the bees, when he says, speaking of the latter,
"... Ille horridus alter
Desidiâ, latamque trahens inglorius alvum."
Georgic, iv. l. 93.
[139] In hives where a queen laying male eggs has been killed, the workers continue to make only male cells, though supplied with a fertile queen, and the fertile workers lay eggs in them. Schirach, 258.
[140] Huber, ii. 425—.