176 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 



improvident, spending the garnered treasure of 

 laborious days in the one mad moment's frolic. 



For it is impossible to regard the incident of 

 the swarm as only one more link in the chain of 

 sober, calculating bee-wisdom. It is obviously a 

 lapse, a general falling away from the all-wise, 

 public polity. For a single hour in her drudging, 

 joyless, perfect life, the worker-bee battens down 

 all the virtues, and rages forth like the Sioux 

 Indian to swill at the stream of forbidden love 

 and laughter, unmindful of the cost. Just when 

 the common self-abnegation is yielding its rich 

 first-fruits of prosperity, and the hive is over- 

 flowing with its wealth of citizens and possessions, 

 this fever comes among them, and spreads like a 

 prairie fire. By all laws of prudence it is now, of 

 all times, that every child of the Mother-State 

 should stand by her mightily, to uphold her in the 

 high place won for her by unending toil and 

 innumerable lives. But old ancestral memory 

 wakens, calling irresistibly. Nature, in the be- 

 ginning of time, made the honey-bee to inhabit 

 a tropic land, where there was no need for pent, 

 cold-withstanding houses, nor any use in laying 

 up provender for days of dearth, because the land 

 flowed with perpetual honey. Bee-life in those 

 far-off ages was all dancing in the sunshine, and 

 the bee-woman had litde to do but to fly to the 

 nearest brimming flower- cup when her nurslings 

 wanted food. But a cooling world, the ever 



