ON THE THRESHOLD OF THE HIVE 17 



the air. Isolate her, and however abundant the food or favour- 

 able the temperature, she will expire in a few days, not of 

 hunger or cold, but of loneliness. From the crowd, from 

 the city, she derives an invisible aliment that is as necessary 

 to her as honey. This craving will help to explain the spii'it of 

 the laws of the hive. For in them the individual is nothing, 

 her existence conditional only, and herself, for one indifferent 

 moment, a winged organ of the race. Her whole life is an 

 entire sacrifice to the manifold, everlasting being whereof she 

 forms part. It is strange to note that it was not always so. 

 We find even to-day, among the melliferous hymenoptera, all 

 the stages of progressive civilisation of our own domestic bee. 

 At the bottom of the scale we find her working alone, in 

 wretchedness, often not seeing her offspring (the Prosopis, the 

 Colletes, &c.), sometimes living in the midst of the limited 

 family that she produces annually (as in the case of the humble- 

 bee). Then she forms temporary associations (the Panurgi, the 

 Dasypods, the Hacliti, &c.), and at last we arrive, through 

 successive stages, at the almost perfect but pitiless society of 

 our hives, where the individual is entirely merged in the re- 

 public, and the republic in its turn invariably sacrificed to 

 the abstract and immortal city of the future. 



8 



Let us not too hastily deduce from these facts conclusions 

 that apply to man. He possesses the power of withstanding 

 certain of nature's laws ; and to know whether such resistance 

 be right or wrong is the gravest, obscurest point in his morality. 

 But it is deeply interesting to discover what the will of nature 



c 



