The bees do not, like ourselves, dwell in towns free to the sky, and exposed to the caprice of rain and storm, but in cities entirely covered with a protecting envelope.  In a state of nature, however, in an ideal climate, this is not the case.  If they listened only to their essential instinct, they would construct their combs in the open air.  In the Indies, the Apis Dorsata will not eagerly seek hollow trees, or a hole in the rocks.  The swarm will hang from the crook of a branch; and the comb will be lengthened, the queen lay her eggs, provisions be stored, with no shelter other than that which the workers’ own bodies provide.  Our Northern bees have at times been known to revert to this instinct, under the deceptive influence of a too gentle sky; and swarms have been found living in the heart of a bush.  But even in the Indies, the result of this habit, which would seem innate, is by no means favourable.  So considerable a number of the workers are compelled to remain on one spot, occupied solely with the maintenance of the heat required by those who are moulding the wax and rearing the brood, that the Apis Dorsata, hanging thus from the branches, will construct but a single comb; whereas if she have the least shelter she will erect four or five, or more, and will proportionately increase the prosperity and the population of the colony.  And indeed we find that all species of bees existing in cold and temperate regions have abandoned this primitive method.  The intelligent initiative of the insect has evidently received the sanction of natural selection, which has allowed only the most numerous and best protected tribes to survive our winters.  What had been merely an idea, therefore, and opposed to instinct, has thus by slow degrees become an instinctive habit.  But it is none the less true that in forsaking the vast light of nature that was so dear to them and seeking shelter in the obscure hollow of a tree or a cavern, the bees have followed what at first was an audacious idea, based on observation, probably, on experience and reasoning.  And this idea might be almost declared to have been as important to the destinies of the domestic bee as was the invention of fire to the destinies of man.

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This great progress, not the less actual for being hereditary and ancient, was followed by an infinite variety of details which prove that the industry, and even the policy, of the hive have not crystallised into infrangible formulae.  We have already mentioned the intelligent substitution of flour for pollen, and of an artificial cement for propolis.  We have seen with what skill the bees are able to adapt to their needs the occasionally disconcerting dwellings into which they are introduced, and the surprising adroitness wherewith they turn combs of foundation-wax to good account.  They display extraordinary ingenuity in their manner of handling these marvellous combs, which are so strangely useful, and yet incomplete.