II 
THE SWARM 
[9] 
E will now, so as to draw more 
closely to nature, consider the 
different episodes of the swarm as they 
come to pass in an ordinary hive, which 
is ten or twenty times more populous 
than an observation one, and leaves the 
bees entirely free and untrammelled. 
Here, then, they have shaken off the 
torpor of winter. The queen started 
laying again in the very first days of 
February, and the workers have flocked 
to the willows and nut-trees, gorse and 
violets, anemones and lungworts. Then 
spring invades the earth, and cellar and 
stream with honey and pollen, while each 
37 
