78 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 
and more than her own. In bumper seasons, 
such as we get all too rarely, when, in sober truth, 
the land is flowing with honey, there is little to 
choose between the rival honey-makers. But 
through good and bad, early and late, for steady, 
dogged industry, invincible hardihood, tangible 
results, the English black bee has out-distanced all 
competitors. Thousands of years have gone to 
her making, and thousands more may conceivably 
fit the yellow-skirted Ligurian for British work. 
But labour for so remote a posterity were altruism 
meeter for angels than for men. 
In her old primeval fastnesses the honey-bee is 
little likely to have troubled herself with hive- 
making, but to have hung her combs to some 
convenient branch in the forest, much as the bees 
in India do to-day. The habit of seeking some 
hollow tree or cleft in the rock grew upon her 
probably as she advanced northward, and some 
nightly or seasonal shelter became more and more 
an imperious need. The present-day customs of 
wild creatures give some inkling of their ancestral 
ways, but it is in their occasional aberrations from 
these customs that we get the truest indications 
of what their original state must have been. 
Lost swarms of bees, if they fail to pitch upon 
some better site, will often build in the open, 
either suspending their waxen houses from some 
horizontal branch, or making them in the heart 
of a thick bush. 
