28 THE LIFE OF THE BEE 



hopes that as yet are formless. In the sleeping city there 

 remain the males from whose ranks the royal lover shall 

 come, the very young bees that tend the brood-cells, and 

 some thousands of workers who continue to forage abroad, 

 to guard the accumulated treasure and preserve the moral 

 traditions of the hive. For each hive has its own code of 

 morals. There are some that are very virtuous and some 

 that are very perverse ; and a careless bee-keeper will often 

 corrupt his people, destroy their respect for the property of 

 others, incite them to pillage, and induce in them habits of 

 conquest and idleness which will render them sources of danger 

 to all the little republics around. These things will result 

 from the bees' discovery that work among distant flowers, 

 whereof many hundreds must be visited to form one drop of 

 honey, is not the only or promptest method of acquiring 

 wealth, but that it is easier to enter ill-guarded cities by 

 stratagem, or force their way into others too weak for self- 

 defence. Nor is it easy to restore to the paths of duty a 

 hive become thus depraved. 



13 



All things go to prove that it is not the queen, but the 

 spirit of the hive, that decides on the swarm. With this 

 queen of ours it happens as with many a chief among men, 

 who though he appear to give orders, is himself obliged to 

 obey commands far more mysterious, far more inexplicable, 

 than those that he issues to his subordinates. The hour once 

 fixed, the spirit will probably let it be known at break of 

 dawn, or the previous night, if indeed not two nights before ; 



