130 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 



through the experience of countless generations, 

 and applied by each individual to the common 

 want, just as hunger impels all mankind to eat. 



Such a condition of affairs, even in a community 

 of human beings, would imply a very high state of 

 mental, if not of moral, development in the indi- 

 vidual. It would mean entire negation of self in 

 the interest of the common good. Even with all 

 the forces of heredity at work, it would need stern 

 ascetic training for the young, and for the trans- 

 gressing adult a swift and merciless retribution, if 

 the last dream of communism — the abolition of all 

 law and penalty, and the establishment of a natural 

 autonomy of well-doing — were ever to be realised 

 in fact. And yet some such state of things appears 

 to exist in the bee-commonwealth : the individual 

 worker-bee seems to be the product of some such 

 system carried on through an indefinite space of 

 time. Order is preserved, public works go dili- 

 gently forward, the clock of the national progress 

 keeps time to the second, not because there is a 

 central wisdom-force to plan, to govern, to awe 

 recalcitrants, but because every worker-bee is her- 

 self the State in miniature, all propensities alien to 

 the pure collective spirit having been long ago 

 bred out of her by the sheer necessities of her case. 



The worker-bee, as we see her in the hive to- 

 day, although evolution must have been busy 

 through the ages determining her present mind- 

 power and bodily conformation, is nevertheless as 



