176 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 
improvident, spending the garnered treasure of 
laborious days in the one mad moment's frolic. 
For it is impossible to regard the incident of 
the swarm as only one more link in the chain of 
sober, calculating bee-wisdom. It is obviously a 
lapse, a general falling away from the all-wise, 
public polity. For a single hour in her drudging, 
joyless, perfect life, the worker-bee battens down 
all the virtues, and rages forth like the Sioux 
Indian to swill at the stream of forbidden love 
and laughter, unmindful of the cost. Just when 
the common self-abnegation is yielding its rich 
first-fruits of prosperity, and the hive is over- 
flowing with its wealth of citizens and possessions, 
this fever comes among them, and spreads like a 
prairie fire. By all laws of prudence it is now, of 
all times, that every child of the Mother-State 
should stand by her mightily, to uphold her in the 
high place won for her by unending toil and 
innumerable lives. But old ancestral memory 
wakens, calling irresistibly. Nature, in the be- 
ginning of time, made the honey-bee to inhabit 
a tropic land, where there was no need for pent, 
cold-withstanding houses, nor any use in laying 
up provender for days of dearth, because the land 
flowed with perpetual honey. Bee-life in those 
far-off ages was all dancing in the sunshine, and 
the bee-woman had little to do but to fly to the 
nearest brimming flower-cup when her nurslings 
wanted food. But a cooling world, the ever 
