178 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 



vary the monotony of well-doing. No wonder 

 the honey-bee swarms, breaks helter-skelter out 

 of her prison-bounds of order, commendable toil, 

 chill, maidenly propriety ; and goes rioting away 

 for one short hour of joyousness and madcap 

 frolic, such as her primaeval sisters looked to as 

 the common day's lot, when there were no hives, 

 and motherhood was not the sole prerogative of 

 one in thirty thousand, and when the sun burned 

 high and cheerily in heaven from end to end of 

 the tropic year. It is easy to be wise, and tem- 

 perately scientific, in accounting for this feverish 

 impulse of the worker-bees, allotting it a sound 

 and circumspect part in the furtherance of the 

 general polity. But is it not, in the main, Nature — 

 the atrophied sexual spirit — awakening, or at least 

 stirring a little in her age-long sleep ? In the 

 sultry August evenings the young queens of the 

 ant-hills pour out in unnumbered thousands to 

 meet the males, and people the ruddy sunshine 

 with the glint of their wings. This is swarming 

 in its truest sense. The wingless, workful, under- 

 ground existence follows, but the love-flight of the 

 ants, while it lasts, is none the less a real, intensely 

 joyous thing. And surely the swarming-fever 

 that so strangely and inopportunely seizes upon 

 hive-life, is at one with it in nature and spirit, 

 although its original purpose and value have been 

 long ago lost in the ages. 

 The one in the whole multitude who alone has 



