The Swarm 
ranging from profound delight to menace, 
distress and anger; they have the ode of 
the queen, the songs of abundance, the 
psalms of grief, and lastly the long and 
mysterious war-cries the adolescent prin- 
cesses send forth during the combats and 
massacres that precede the nuptial flight. 
May this be a fortuitous music that fails 
to attain their inward silence? In any 
event they seem not the least disturbed at 
the noises we make near the hive; but they 
regard these perhaps as not of their world, 
and possessed of no interest for them. 
It is possible that we on our side only 
hear a fractional part of the sounds that 
the bees produce, and that they have 
many harmonies to which our ears are not 
attuned. We soon shall see with what 
startling rapidity they are able to under- 
stand each other, and adopt concerted 
measures, when for instance the great honey 
thief, the huge Sphinx Atropos, the sinister 
butterfly that bears a death’s head on its 
back, penetrates into the hive, humming 
its own strange note, which acts as a kind 
of irresistible incantation; the news spreads 
45 
