202 LIFE AND SPORT IN HAMPSHIRE 



hive with its hanging row of bar-frames, each sup- 

 porting a sheet of wax, ready to work out into cells. 

 Instead, the bees will waste a precious day or more 

 at the height of the honey flow, examining, re- 

 examining, some crevices about a wall or roof, which 

 are not the least good to them. It is mentioned 

 as a sign of the bee's wisdom that the swarm coming 

 forth will often fly several miles away from their old 

 home as proof that the bee does not wish to over- 

 crowd his neighbour. But if so, why, when the 

 swarm is shaken down in the cool of the evening 

 on a white sheet outside the empty hive, do the 

 bees promptly crowd up, with all the music of satis- 

 faction, carrying their queen with them, and take 

 possession ? 



No, the bee intelligence is strictly limited. What 

 we term reasoning power does not seem to exist 

 among bees. The arrangement, the order of their 

 State, is beautiful. The spirit of the hive is beyond 

 praise in its devotion, endurance, fiery patriotism. 

 But here end the virtues of the bee. Compared with 

 those qualities her intellect is beneath contempt. Her 

 machinery of mind cannot move outside the deep 

 worn grooves of habit, which I suppose were slowly 

 made, geologically slow, in the unreckoned thousands 

 of years of her unknown history for this must be 

 one of the most ancient civilisations in the world. 



Watching beasts, birds, and insects, one is struck 

 by the dead level of their intelligence, by its diffusion 



