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Let us not too hastily deduce from these facts conclusions that apply to man.  He possesses the power of withstanding certain of nature’s laws; and to know whether such resistance be right or wrong is the gravest and obscurest point in his morality.  But it is deeply interesting to discover what the will of nature may be in a different world; and this will is revealed with extraordinary clearness in the evolution of the hymenoptera, which, of all the inhabitants of this globe, possess the highest degree of intellect after that of man.  The aim of nature is manifestly the improvement of the race; but no less manifest is her inability, or refusal, to obtain such improvement except at the cost of the liberty, the rights, and the happiness of the individual.  In proportion as a society organises itself, and rises in the scale, so does a shrinkage enter the private life of each one of its members.  Where there is progress, it is the result only of a more and more complete sacrifice of the individual to the general interest.  Each one is compelled, first of all, to renounce his vices, which are acts of independence.  For instance, at the last stage but one of apiarian civilisation, we find the humble-bees, which are like our cannibals.  The adult workers are incessantly hovering around the eggs, which they seek to devour, and the mother has to display the utmost stubbornness in their defence.  Then having freed himself from his most dangerous vices, each individual has to acquire a certain number of more and more painful virtues.  Among the humble-bees, for instance, the workers do not dream of renouncing love, whereas our domestic bee lives in a state of perpetual chastity.  And indeed we soon shall show how much more she has to abandon, in exchange for the comfort and security of the hive, for its architectural, economic, and political perfection; and we shall return to the evolution of the hymenoptera in the chapter devoted to the progress of the species.

II

THE SWARM

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We will now, so as to draw more closely to nature, consider the different episodes of the swarm as they come to pass in an ordinary hive, which is ten or twenty times more populous than an observation one, and leaves the bees entirely free and untrammelled.

Here, then, they have shaken off the torpor of winter.  The queen started laying again in the very first days of February, and the workers have flocked to the willows and nut-trees, gorse and violets, anemones and lungworts.  Then spring invades the earth, and cellar and stream with honey and pollen, while each day beholds the birth of thousands of bees.  The overgrown males now all sally forth from their cells, and disport themselves on the combs; and so crowded does the too prosperous city become that hundreds of belated workers, coming back from the flowers towards evening, will vainly seek shelter within, and will be forced to