Students of old books on the honey-bee—and perhaps there has been more written about bees during the last two thousand years than of all other creatures put together—do not quite know what to make of Moses Rusden, who was Charles the Second’s bee-master, and wrote his “Further Discovery of Bees” in the year 1679.  The wonder about Rusden is that obviously he knew so much that was true about bee-life, and yet seems, of set purpose, to have imparted so little.  He was a shrewdly observant man, of lifelong experience in his craft.  His system of bee-keeping would not have disgraced many an apiculturist of the present time, often yielding him a honey harvest averaging sixty pounds to the hive, which is a result not always achieved even by our foremost scientists.  His hives were fitted with glass windows, through which he was continually studying his bees.  He must have had endless opportunities of proving the fallacy and of the ancient classic notions as to bee-life.  And yet we find him gravely upholding almost the entire framework of fantastic error, old even in Pliny’s time; and speaking of the king-bee with his generals, captains, and , honey that was a dew divinely sent down from heaven, the propagation of bee-kind from the flowers, and all the other curious myths and handed down from writer to writer since the very earliest days.  
But, reading on in the little time-stained, worm-eaten book, it is not very difficult to guess at last why Rusden adopted this attitude.  He was the King’s bee-master, and therefore a courtier first and a afterwards.  In the first flush of the Restoration, anyone who had anything to say in support of the divine right of kings was certain to catch the Royal eye.  Rusden admits himself with Butler’s “Feminine Monarchie,” published some fifty years before, in which the writer argues that the single great bee in a hive was really a female.  To a man of Rusden’s practical experience and deductive quality of mind, this statement must have lead, and no doubt did lead, to all sorts of and discoveries.  But with a ruler of Charles the Second’s , feminine were not to be thought of.  Rusden saw at once his and his opportunity, and wrote his book on bees, which is really an ingenious attempt to show that the system of a self-ruling is a of nature, and that, whether for bees or men, government under a king is the divinely state.
 
Whether, however, Rusden was insincere, or actually succeeded in blinding himself conveniently for his own purposes, it must be admitted not only that he argued the case with singular , but that never did facts adapt themselves so readily to either conscious or unconscious misrepresentation.  In the glass-windowed hives of the Royal bee-house at Saint James’s, he was able to show the King a nation of creatures evidently united under a common rule, labouring together in harmony and producing works little short of miraculous to the mediæval eye.  He saw that these creatures were of two sorts, each going about its duty after its kind, but that in each colony there was one bee, and only one, which differed from the rest.  To this single large bee all the others paid the greatest .  It was cared for and nourished, and attended assiduously in its progress over the combs.  All the humanly approved tokens of were manifest about it.  No wonder the King’s bee-master was not slow in recognising that, in those troublous times, he could do his patron no greater service than by pointing out to the and ignorant multitude—still looking askance at the restored monarchy—such indisputable evidence in nature of Charles’s parallel right.
 
And perhaps nature has never been at such pains to her true processes from the vulgar eye as in this case of the honey-bee.  If Rusden ever suspected that the one large bee in each colony was really the mother of all the rest, and had set himself to prove it, he would have found the whole array of visible facts in to him.  If ever a truth seemed established beyond all reasonable doubt, it was that the ordinary male-and-female principle, throughout the rest of creation, was in the single instance of the honey-bee.  The ancients explained this anomaly as a special gift from the gods, and the bees were supposed to discover the germs of bee-life in certain kinds of flowers and to bring them home to the cells for development.  Rusden improved upon this idea by assigning to his king-bee the duty of fertilising these

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