The Life of the Bee 



crowd those who shall go forth, and de- 

 clares who shall remain ? No special 

 class divides those who stay from those 

 who wander abroad ; it will be the 

 younger here and the elder there ; around 

 each queen who shall never return vete- 

 ran foragers jostle tiny workers, who 

 for the first time shall face the dizziness 

 of the blue. Nor is the proportionate 

 strength of a swarm controlled by chance 

 or accident, by the momentary dejection 

 or transport of an instinct, thought, or 

 feeling. I have more than once tried 

 to establish a relation between the num- 

 ber of bees composing a swarm and the 

 number of those that remain ; and al- 

 though the difficulties of this calculation 

 are such as to preclude anything ap- 

 proaching mathematical precision, I have 

 at least been able to gather that this 

 relation — if we take into account the 

 brood-cells, or in other words the forth- 

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