The Life of the Bee 
she erects her somewhat shapeless waxen 
cells, stores these with honey and pollen, lays 
and hatches the eggs, tends and nourishes 
the larve that spring to life, and soon is 
surrounded by a troop of daughters who aid 
her in all her labours within the nest and 
without, while some of them soon begin to 
lay in their turn. The construction of the 
cells improves; the colony grows, the com- 
fort increases. The foundress is still its 
soul, its principal mother, and finds herself 
now at the head of a kingdom which might 
be the model of that of our honey-bee. 
But the model is still in the rough. The 
prosperity of the humble-bees never exceeds 
a certain limit, their laws are ill defined 
and ill obeyed, primitive cannibalism and 
infanticide reappear at intervals, the archi- 
tecture is shapeless, and entails much waste 
of material; but the cardinal difference 
between the two cities is that the one is 
permanent and the other ephemeral. For, 
indeed, that of the humble-bee will perish 
in the autumn; its three or four hundred 
inhabitants will die, leaving no trace of their 
passage or their endeavours, and but a single 
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