178 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 
vary the monotony of well-doing. No wonder 
the honey-bee swarms, breaks helter-skelter out 
of her prison-bounds of order, commendable toil, 
chill, maidenly propriety ; and goes rioting away 
for one short hour of joyousness and madcap 
frolic, such as her primzeval sisters looked to as 
the common day’s lot, when there were no hives, 
and motherhood was not the sole prerogative of 
one in thirty thousand, and when the sun burned 
high and cheerily in heaven from end to end of 
the tropic year. It is easy to be wise, and tem- 
perately scientific, in accounting for this feverish 
impulse of the worker-bees, allotting it a sound 
and circumspect part in the furtherance of the 
general polity. But is it not, in the main, Nature— 
the atrophied sexual spirit—awakening, or at least 
Stirring a little in her age-long sleep? In the 
sultry August evenings the young queens of the 
ant-hills pour out in unnumbered thousands to 
meet the males, and people the ruddy sunshine 
with the glint of their wings. This is swarming 
in its truest sense. The wingless, workful, under- 
ground existence follows, but the love-flight of the 
ants, while it lasts, is none the less a real, intensely 
joyous thing. And surely the swarming-fever 
that so strangely and inopportunely seizes upon 
hive-life, is at one with it in nature and spirit, 
although its original purpose and value have been 
long ago lost in the ages. 
The one in the whole multitude who alone has 
