144 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW 
become a quagmire. But by setting up a mechani- 
cally-driven current the air is drawn out before 
condensation can take place, and thus, in one 
operation, forming a veritable triumph in economics, 
the hive interior is rendered both dry and salutary, 
while its temperature is sustained at the necessary 
hatching-point for the young brood. 
A reflection which will occur to most thinking 
minds is, why should the domesticated honey-bee 
be constrained to resort to all these devices, when 
the wild bee seems to lead a happy-go-lucky 
existence, comparatively free, so far as we know, 
from such complicated cares? The answer to this 
is that the science of apiculture has wrought a 
change in the bees’ normal environment which is 
probably without parallel in the whole history of the 
domestication of the lower creatures. In a modern 
hive the honey-bee lives on a vastly elaborated scale, 
and the ancient rules of bee-life are no longer 
applicable. Much the same sort of thing has 
happened as in the case of a village which has 
grown to a city. It is useless to deal with the new 
order of things as a mere question of arithmetic. 
Abnormal growth in a community involves change 
not only in scale but in principle; and it is the same 
with a hive of bees as with a hive of men. 
