as the work of the cells is concerned, each bee acts as though she were alone; but all make equal use of the gallery that conducts to the cells, so that the multitude profit by the labours of an individual, and are spared the time and trouble required for the construction of separate galleries.  It would be interesting to discover whether this preliminary work be not executed in common, by relays of females, relieving each other in turn.”

However this may be, the fraternal idea has pierced the wall that divided two worlds.  It is no longer wild and unrecognisable, wrested from instinct by cold and hunger, or by the fear of death; it is prompted by active life.  But it halts once more; and in this instance arrives no further.  No matter, it does not lose courage; it will seek other channels.  It enters the humble-bee, and, maturing there, becomes embodied in a different atmosphere, and works its first decisive miracles.

The humble-bees, the great hairy, noisy creatures that all of us know so well, so harmless for all their apparent fierceness, lead a solitary life at first.  At the beginning of March the impregnated female who has survived the winter starts to construct her nest, either underground or in a bush, according to the species to which she belongs.  She is alone in the world, in the midst of awakening spring.  She chooses a spot, clears it, digs it and carpets it.  Then she erects her somewhat shapeless waxen cells, stores these with honey and pollen, lays and hatches the eggs, tends and nourishes the larvae that spring to life, and soon is surrounded by a troop of daughters who aid her in all her labours, within the nest and without, while some of them soon begin to lay in their turn.  The construction of the cells improves; the colony grows, the comfort increases.  The foundress is still its soul, its principal mother, and finds herself now at the head of a kingdom which might be the model of that of our honeybee.  But the model is still in the rough.

The prosperity of the humble-bees never exceeds a certain limit, their laws are ill-defined and ill-obeyed, primitive cannibalism and infanticide reappear at intervals, the architecture is shapeless and entails much waste of material; but the cardinal difference between the two cities is that the one is permanent, and the other ephemeral.  For, indeed, that of the humble-bee will perish in the autumn; its three or four hundred inhabitants will die, leaving no trace of their passage or their endeavours; and but a single female will survive, who, the next spring, in the same solitude and poverty as her mother before her, will recommence the same useless work.  The idea, however, has now grown aware of its strength.  Among the humble-bees it goes no further than we have stated, but, faithful to its habits and pursuing its usual routine, it will immediately undergo a sort of unwearying metempsychosis, and re-incarnate itself, trembling with its last triumph, rendered all-powerful now and nearly perfect, in another group, the last but one of the race, that which immediately precedes our domestic bee wherein it attains its crown; the group of the Meliponitae, which comprises the tropical Meliponae and Trigonae.