196 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 
among themselves the tendency is rather to 
magnify the virtues and achievements of their 
charges: to be over-lavish of inference from too 
scanty or too isolated facts. And the proved 
impossibility of having anything to do with the 
honey-bee without being carried away sooner or 
later on a high wave of enthusiasm, makes any 
attempt at holding the balances truly between the 
zealous bee-lover and the interested but temperate- 
minded reader, a difficult and delicate task. Any 
writer on the honey-bee nowadays must be 
reckoned an ultra-specialist in an age of specialism ; 
and here it is not easy to preserve the sense of 
proportion undimmed, especially for one admittedly 
speaking out of the ranks of beemanship, where all 
are aiders and abettors in ardour, impatient of any 
estimation falling short of high-water mark. 
The story of the Comb-Builders, however, sets 
none of the usual pitfalls in the way of the over- 
enthusiastic penman. In its soberest incident and 
least important detail it is so wonderful, that 
exhuberance of language is as powerless to exag- 
gerate, as a niggardly tongue to minithise, its true 
and due effect. If the ordering of the bee-common- 
wealth—the intricate systems of sanitation, division 
of labour, treatment of the queen and worker-larve, 
and the like—is subject for marvel, and seems 
infallibly to denote the possession of high facul- 
ties, a much greater degree of acumen must be 
conceded to the worker-bee, when we come to 
