spend the night on the threshold, where they will be decimated by the cold.  Restlessness seizes the people, and the old queen begins to stir.  She feels that a new destiny is being prepared.  She has religiously fulfilled her duty as a good creatress; and from this duty done there result only tribulation and sorrow.  An invincible power menaces her tranquillity; she will soon be forced to quit this city of hers, where she has reigned.  But this city is her work, it is she, herself.  She is not its queen in the sense in which men use the word.  She issues no orders; she obeys, as meekly as the humblest of her subjects, the masked power, sovereignly wise, that for the present, and till we attempt to locate it, we will term the “spirit of the hive.”  But she is the unique organ of love; she is the mother of the city.  She founded it amid uncertainty and poverty.  She has peopled it with her own substance; and all who move within its walls—­workers, males, larvae, nymphs, and the young princesses whose approaching birth will hasten her own departure, one of them being already designed as her successor by the “spirit of the hive”—­all these have issued from her flanks.

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What is this “spirit of the hive”—­where does it reside?  It is not like the special instinct that teaches the bird to construct its well planned nest, and then seek other skies when the day for migration returns.  Nor is it a kind of mechanical habit of the race, or blind craving for life, that will fling the bees upon any wild hazard the moment an unforeseen event shall derange the accustomed order of phenomena.  On the contrary, be the event never so masterful, the “spirit of the hive” still will follow it, step by step, like an alert and quickwitted slave, who is able to derive advantage even from his master’s most dangerous orders.

It disposes pitilessly of the wealth and the happiness, the liberty and life, of all this winged people; and yet with discretion, as though governed itself by some great duty.  It regulates day by day the number of births, and contrives that these shall strictly accord with the number of flowers that brighten the country-side.  It decrees the queen’s deposition or warns her that she must depart; it compels her to bring her own rivals into the world, and rears them royally, protecting them from their mother’s political hatred.  So, too, in accordance with the generosity of the flowers, the age of the spring, and the probable dangers of the nuptial flight, will it permit or forbid the first-born of the virgin princesses to slay in their cradles her younger sisters, who are singing the song of the queens.  At other times, when the season wanes, and flowery hours grow shorter, it will command the workers themselves to slaughter the whole imperial brood, that the era of revolutions may close, and work become the sole object of all.  The “spirit of the hive “is prudent and thrifty, but by no means parsimonious.  And thus, aware, it would seem, that nature’s laws are somewhat wild and extravagant in all that pertains to love, it tolerates, during summer days of abundance, the embarrassing presence in the hive of three or four hundred males, from whose ranks the queen about to be born shall select her lover; three or four hundred foolish, clumsy, useless, noisy creatures, who are pretentious, gluttonous, dirty, coarse, totally and scandalously idle, insatiable, and enormous.