THE MYSTERY OF THE SWARM 179 
the full inheritance of her sex, the queen-bee, 
seems often at the fountain-head of the revolution. 
Sometimes, undoubtedly, it is she who first de- 
velops this longing, feverish unrest, and by little 
and little communicates it to the whole colony. 
Here the variability of bee-nature comes sharply 
into evidence. Some hives will show this restless 
spirit for many days before the swarm issues, 
while with others the great upheaval seems, as 
far as the mass of bees is concerned, to be a 
sudden unpremeditated thing occurring in the 
midst of the universal content and industry. 
The preparations for raising new queens are 
always taken in hand betimes, but probably this is 
the work of the far-seeing, sober old bees of the 
hive, with whom communism has become a settled 
and accepted calamity. The bees who will ulti- 
mately constitute the swarm may be supposed to 
nourish their secret desires from the first moment 
the queen shows signs of mutability; to neglect 
all their old tasks, first in heart and then in reality ; 
and finally—when the queen’s mood has reached 
its culminating point, and her work in the hive is 
in virtual abeyance—to throw down plummet and 
trowel and hod, and rush forth in a wild, hilarious 
company, urged by a longing that they are as 
powerless to resist as to understand. 
In the study of bee-life one comes upon many 
questions, but seldom answers to fit all. If the 
queen’s fecundation takes place only once in her 
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