172 THE RING OF NATURE 



has come forth to her arduous labours, there are 

 young bees helping the old ones, now laying down 

 one by one their life's work, to forage in the early 

 flowers and raise constantly increasing hundreds 

 of bees of the year. 



In April, before the humble-bee has got one 

 daughter to assist her, the hive queen is laying a 

 thousand eggs a day and accelerating towards 

 three or four times that number. In May, the 

 hive is boiling over with sixty or seventy thousand 

 bees, with as many more in the cells, and by 

 swarming it divides itself into two parts, each of 

 which seems by a miracle as multitudinous as the 

 original whole. Ten days later, the old hive will 

 often send out another swarm, and the first swarm 

 may itself swarm before June is out. So the 

 hive that I may show you with two bees for 

 every one of the strongest wasp nest may represent 

 but a third of the increase from the loins of one 

 queen. 



When the eminent bee-keeper, Dzierzon, lost all 

 his hives but ten, he raised their number in three 

 years to four hundred, an increase that is perhaps 

 not, as men say, * the limit,' but shows fairly well 

 the multiplying power of the honey-bee. When 

 the bees of an ultra-prolific race, like the Cyprians, 

 raise queens preparatory to swarming, they some- 

 times run to the number of thirty in a single hive, 

 and each of these under favourable circumstances 

 might become, with a handful of bees to give her 

 a start, the mother of a full hive. Yet in a wild 



