78 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 



and more than her own. In bumper seasons, 

 such as we get all too rarely, when, in sober truth, 

 the land is flowing with honey, there is little to 

 choose between the rival honey-makers. But 

 through good and bad, early and late, for steady, 

 dogged industry, invincible hardihood, tangible 

 results, the English black bee has out-distanced all 

 competitors. Thousands of years have gone to 

 her making, and thousands more may conceivably 

 fit the yellow-skirted Ligurian for British work. 

 But labour for so remote a posterity were altruism 

 meeter for angels than for men. 



In her old primaeval fastnesses the honey-bee is 

 little likely to have troubled herself with hive- 

 making, but to have hung her combs to some 

 convenient branch in the forest, much as the bees 

 in India do to-day. The habit of seeking some 

 hollow tree or cleft in the rock grew upon her 

 probably as she advanced northward, and some 

 nightly or seasonal shelter became more and more 

 an imperious need. The present-day customs of 

 wild creatures give some inkling of their ancestral 

 ways, but it is in their occasional aberrations from 

 these customs that we get the truest indications 

 of what their original state must have been. 

 Lost swarms of bees, if they fail to pitch upon 

 some better site, will often build in the open, 

 either suspending their waxen houses from some 

 horizontal branch, or making them in the heart 

 of a thick bush. 



