xvi THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 
glades of primzeval forests as zealously as any 
bee-keeper of the present day. 
Speculation of this kind is necessarily far-fetched 
and fantastic, and can be but half seriously under- 
taken with so small and inconsiderable a creature 
as the honey-bee. But it is interesting from one 
special, and not often adopted, point of view. 
There is no more fascinating study than that of 
the ancient civilisations of the world. Egypt 
10,000 years ago, Babylon probably still earlier, 
China that seems to have stopped at finite perfec- 
tion in all ways that matter little, ages before the 
time of Abraham. But all these are of mushroom 
growth compared with the antiquity of bee-civilisa- 
tion. It is only a tale of Lilliput, of a microscopic 
people living and moving on a mimic stage. Yet, 
perhaps tens of thousands of years before man had 
made fire, or chipped a flint into an axe-head, these 
winged nations had evolved a perfect plan of life, 
and solved social problems such as are only just 
beginning to cloud the horizon of human existence 
in the twentieth century. And they, and their 
intricate communal polity, have not passed away 
into dust, as the great human nations of bygone 
ages have done, and as those of the present day 
may be destined to do, for all we can tell. 
Will a time come when we must learn from the 
