On the Threshold of the Hive 
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 spirit 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 do- 
mestic bee. At the bottom of the scale 
we find her working alone, in wretched- 
ness, often not seeing her offspring (the 
Prosopis, the Colletes, etc.) ; sometimes 
living in the midst of the limited 
family that she produces annually (as in 
the case of the humble-bee). Then she 
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