THE GENESIS OF THE QUEEN 97 
Right in the heart of the winter-cluster he sees 
the queen bestirring herself to lay the first eggs, 
and the bees around her slowly awakening to the 
duty before them. With the passing of the weeks, 
he sees the brood-area steadily enlarging; the 
hitherto close-packed throng of workers gradually 
extending itself over a larger space of comb; the 
water-fetchers increasingly busy; the pollen- 
gathering bees already at work in the crocus- 
borders of the garden, where the year’s first gold 
and white and purple is gaily flaunting in the sun. 
He notes that the progress of the colony within 
the warm hive does not go by the calendar, but 
checks with each return of cold, and forges ahead 
only when the spring seems to be coming in right 
good earnest. He sees, even now, when February 
is waning and the hazel-catkins fill the bare wood- 
land with a shimmer of emerald, that the colony 
still husbands its stores, eking them out with a 
long-sighted parsimony that shall be more than 
justified when the inevitable cold break comes in 
the flowery midst of the English May. It is 
impossible to overlook the evidence of a wise, 
directing mind through it all; and where should 
this be seated but in the brain of the single large 
bee, courted and fed and groomed unceasingly by 
the attendant host around her—she who is the 
teeming mother of past tens of thousands, and who 
carries in her body the seed of all the generations 
to come? 
7 
