THE COMMONWEALTH OF THE HIVE 79 



The ways of the honey-bee are full of such 

 deviations, due, perhaps, to the working of old 

 ancestral memory rousing dimly in the midst of 

 modern needs. The issue of a swarm may be 

 nothing else than the survival of an old process, 

 vital enough in its day, but, under the present 

 civilised conditions of bee-life, lacking the whet of 

 entire necessity. For, in all respects, the life of 

 the bee, ancient as it is, is an evolved civilisation, 

 and not a surviving, aboriginal state. It is con- 

 ceivable that the foxes have their holes, and the 

 birds their nests, much after the same fashion as 

 in the days when Adam invented love-making. 

 But the twentieth-century honey-bee is not of 

 this kind. The communal habit itself may even 

 have been a comparatively late introduction in 

 her progress. It is possible to get some idea of 

 the path she won for herself through the ages by 

 studying the ways of creatures now living, but 

 immeasurably less advanced than the bee. There 

 are distant connections of hers — lonely little wood- 

 wasps and others — which never associate with 

 their kind, but get through the short summer 

 hours in solitude, and die with the waning season, 

 leaving the perpetuation of their species to the 

 children they never see. The common wasp is 

 nearer the honey-bee in development, but still 

 infinitely far behind. The fecundated queen-wasp 

 comes oiit of her winter hiding-place, fashions a 

 cell or two in some hole in the ground, and 



