54 
FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 
A day or two after the departure of the swarm, a 
young virgin queen will crawl out of her cell. Her 
expectant people having gnawed around the top rim, 
her cell has quite a perfect little lid which she pushes 
up as if on a hinge. 
After five or six days she has gained strength and 
must soon settle down to her mission in life as an 
egg-laying machine. 
Admirers of Maeterlinck’s writings are happily 
familiar with his study of bee life, entitled La Vie 
des Abeilles. The gifted, mystical poet and philoso¬ 
pher soars, with his queen bee, to great impassioned 
heights, yet his treatment of the entire subject is 
complete and scientific. 
No one has described the mating of the queen 
so beautifully as Maeterlinck. He makes of it a 
veritable ecstasy and truly it seems so. 
She always mates on the wing and supposedly her 
wedding flight and her flight later with the swarm 
are her only glimpses of daylight. Only once does 
she need to be mated and she tries her wings and 
then sails aloft, high into the heavens. Her mate 
may be a drone from her own hive or one from some 
hive a mile away, but whoever reaches her must be 
strong and swift. They mate high up in the sunlit 
air and then whirl down to earth together. The 
