202 THE LIFE OF THE BEE 



years have passed since the foundation of rational, practical 

 apiculture was rendered possible by the movable combs and 

 frames devised by Dzierzon and Langstroth, and since the 

 hive has ceased to be the inviolable abode wherein all came 

 to pass in a mystery from which death alone stripped the 

 veil. And lastly, less than fifty years have elapsed since 

 the improvements of the microscope, of the entomologist's 

 laboratory, revealed the precise secret of the principal organs 

 of the workers, of the mother, and the males. Need we 

 wonder if our knowledge be as limited as our experience ? 

 The bees have existed many thousands of years ; we have 

 watched them for ten or twelve lustres. And if it could 

 even be proved that no change has occurred in the hive 

 since we first opened it, should we have the right to conclude 

 that nothing had changed before our first questioning glance ? 

 Do we not know that in the evolution of species a century 

 is but as a drop of rain that is caught in the whirl of the 

 river, and that millenaries glide as swiftly over the life of 

 universal matter as single years over the history of a people .? 



lOI 



But there is no warrant for the statement that the habits 

 of the bees are unchanged. If we examine them with an 

 unbiassed eye, and without emerging from the small area 

 lit by our actual experience, we shall, on the contrary, dis- 

 cover marked variations. And who shall tell how many 

 escape us ? Were an observer of a hundred and fifty times 

 our height and about seven hundred and fifty thousand times 

 our importance (these being the relations of stature and weight 



