THE COMMONWEALTH OF THE HIVE 79 
The ways of the honey-bee are full of such 
deviations, due, perhaps, to the working of old 
ancestral memory rousing dimly in the midst of 
modern needs. The issue of a swarm may be 
nothing else than the survival of an old process, 
vital enough in its day, but, under the present 
civilised conditions of bee-life, lacking the whet of 
entire necessity. For, in all respects, the life of 
the bee, ancient as it is, is an evolved civilisation, 
and not a surviving, aboriginal state. It is con- 
ceivable that the foxes have their holes, and the 
birds their nests, much after the same fashion as 
in the days when Adam invented love-making. 
But the twentieth-century honey-bee is not of 
this kind. The communal habit itself may even 
have been a comparatively late introduction in 
her progress. It is possible to get some idea of 
the path she won for herself through the ages by 
studying the ways of creatures now living, but 
immeasurably less advanced than the bee. There 
are distant connections of hers—lonely little wood- 
wasps and others—which never associate with 
their kind, but get through the short summer 
hours in solitude, and die with the waning season, 
leaving the perpetuation of their species to the 
children they never see. The common wasp is 
nearer the honey-bee in development, but still 
infinitely far behind. The fecundated queen-wasp 
comes out of her winter hiding-place, fashions a 
cell or two in some hole in the ground, and 
