26 THE LIFE OF THE BEE 



may well seem incomprehensible, for it is entirely opposed 

 to all our own instincts and feelings — 60 or 70,000 bees out 

 of the 80 or 90,000 that form the whole population, will 

 abandon the maternal city at the prescribed hour. They will 

 not leave at a moment of despair ; or desert, with sudden and 

 wild resolve, a home laid waste by famine, disease, or war. 

 No ; the exile has long been planned, and the favourable hour 

 patiently awaited. Were the hive poor, had it suffered from 

 pillage or storm, had misfortune befallen the royal family, 

 the bees would not forsake it. They leave it only when it 

 has attained the apogee of its prosperity ; at a time when, 

 after the arduous labours of the spring, the immense palace 

 of wax has its 120,000 well-arranged cells overflowing with 

 new honey, and with the many-coloured flour, known as " bees' 

 bread," on which nymphs and larvs are fed. 



Never is the hive more beautiful than on the eve of its 

 heroic renouncement, in its unrivalled hour of fullest abundance 

 and joy ; serene, for all its apparent excitement and feverishness. 

 Let us endeavour to picture it to ourselves — not as it appears to 

 the bees, for we cannot tell in what magical, formidable fashion 

 things may be reflected in the 6 or 7000 facets of their lateral 

 eyes and the triple cyclopean eye on their brow — but as it 

 would seem to us, were we of their stature. From the height of 

 a dome more colossal than that of St. Peter's at Rome, waxen 

 walls descend to the ground, balanced in the void and the 

 darkness ; gigantic and manifold, vertical and parallel geo- 

 metric constructions, to which, for relative precision, audacity, 

 and vastness, no human structure is comparable. Each of these 

 walls, whose substance still is immaculate and fragi'ant, of 

 virginal, silvery freshness, contains thousands of cells stored 



