The Life of the Bee 
crowd those who shall go forth, and de- 
clares who shall remain? No special 
class divides those who stay from those 
who wander abroad; it will be the 
younger here and the elder there; around 
each queen who shall never return vete- 
ran foragers jostle tiny workers, who 
for the first time shall face the dizziness 
of the blue. Nor is the proportionate 
strength of a swarm controlled by chance 
or accident, by the momentary dejection 
or transport of an instinct, thought, or 
feeling. I have more than once tried 
to establish a relation between the num- 
ber of bees composing a swarm and the 
number of those that remain; and al- 
though the difficulties of this calculation 
are such as to preclude anything ‘ap- 
proaching mathematical precision, I have 
at least been able to gather that this 
relation — if we take into account the 
brood-cells, or in other words the forth- 
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