18 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 
life, and nature intends this to suffice for her 
whole fruitful period, it is not easy to see why she 
should go out with the swarm at all. That she is 
not the inveterate recluse as generally believed, 
and that she does occasionally make short flights 
in the open during her laying career, is well 
proved. The desire, therefore, to see the light 
again after a long incarceration cannot be urged 
as her reason for going off with the swarm. A 
much more feasible notion is that the sexual spirit 
is again roused in the queen, just as it seems to be 
roused for the first time in the worker-bee; and 
that, with all, the journey is undertaken as a 
mating-flight, a faint re-echo of a racial custom 
long extinct, bearing the closest analogy to the 
marriage-swarm from the ant-hill. It must be 
borne in mind that, although the queen-bee is 
undoubtedly rendered capable of producing her 
kind of both sexes during several years, as the 
result of a single fertilisation, it cannot be incon- 
testably held that she never again meets the drone 
under any circumstances. There is nothing in 
her physical organism to prevent a second coition, 
although with the drone this is impossible, for 
more reasons than the all-sufficient one—that he 
dies in his marriage-hour. 
In the old bee-gardens, where the “swarm in 
May ” is still a living, present thing, it is pleasant 
to sit with the proprietor under the rosy shade of 
apple-boughs waiting for the swarms to issue, and 
