66 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 
and ingenious division of endeavour, there cannot 
fail to be a supreme and governing intelligence to 
allot the part that each must play. This story of 
a queen—of a single bee, larger than all the rest, 
to whom all pay allegiance, and who spends her 
whole life in the dim labyrinth of the hive, like the 
Pope in the Vatican—is it a truth, or only a fig- 
ment of the ignorant, bucolic brain? If this queen 
exist, if every hive have indeed its absolute 
monarch, who directs the whole complex life and 
policy of the bee-city, where in the scale of reason- 
ing creatures must she be placed ? 
And then, if he be wise, the student will learn at 
last to give the picturesque old bee-garden its true 
appraisement. Ancient things conserve their 
beauty, and win the love of the right kind of 
lovers, more and more with every century that 
glides by. Only their usefulness, their import in 
the tide of human knowledge and progress, has 
gone with the years. It is so with the bee-garden 
under its Maytide robe of green leaves and rain- 
bow blossoms. It is beautiful in its glad appear- 
ances, its echo of old voices, its odour of the sanc- 
tity in ancient ways and days. But it can tell us 
nothing of all we want to know. It can only ask 
us riddles to which we have no answers, For 
these we must set aside old fanciful scruples ; turn 
our backs, once for all, on its enchantment and its 
sweetness ; bend our steps unswervingly towards 
the great modern bee-farm on the hill. 
