THE MYSTERY OF THE SWARM 175 
or wings away into the upper skies, irrevocable 
as last year’s mill-water. 
Beemen call it the swarming fever; and fever it 
is in very truth. The reasons for it have long 
ago been crystallised into exact and accepted 
phrases. An overcrowded condition of the hive; 
the desire of the bees to get rid of a failing 
queen ; the excitement of the queen herself at the 
menace of coming rivals; the natural instinct of. 
colonies to increase and multiply—anything but 
the one all-sufficient and obvious reason, that 
bees swarm because they suddenly and intensely 
desire it. 
The story of the Sioux Indian,—won for civili- 
sation from boyhood, over-educated and over- 
refined, decorated with a high college-degree and 
adorning a great pulpit, and then casting it all to 
the four winds, stripping and painting himself, and 
raging away with his kind on the war-trail,—has 
a near parallel in the behaviour of bees at 
swarming-time. Instinct could never be a party 
to such an inconsequent, outrageous, brilliantly 
reckless, joyous proceeding. But it is ever in the 
way of reason to be splendidly unreasonable at 
times, and here the honey-bee shows herself the 
true child of her origins. From a stern, self- 
elected destiny-maker, callously pressing to the 
forefront of life over all obstacles of heart and 
hearth, she changes back, for the nonce, into the 
aboriginal bee-woman, thoughtless, pleasure-loving, 
