The figures given here are scrupulously exact.  They are those of a well-filled hive in full prosperity.

On the day, then, that the Spirit of the Hive has ordained, a certain part of the population will go forth, selected in accordance with sure and immovable laws, and make way for hopes that as yet are formless.  In the sleeping city there remain the males, from whose ranks the royal lover shall come, the very young bees that tend the brood-cells, and some thousands of workers who continue to forage abroad, to guard the accumulated treasure, and preserve the moral traditions of the hive.  For each hive has its own code of morals.  There are some that are very virtuous and some that are very perverse; and a careless bee-keeper will often corrupt his people, destroy their respect for the property of others, incite them to pillage, and induce in them habits of conquest and idleness which will render them sources of danger to all the little republics around.  These things result from the bee’s discovery that work among distant flowers, whereof many hundreds must be visited to form one drop of honey, is not the only or promptest method of acquiring wealth, but that it is easier to enter ill-guarded cities by stratagem, or force her way into others too weak for self-defence.  Nor is it easy to restore to the paths of duty a hive that has become thus depraved.

[13]

All things go to prove that it is not the queen, but the spirit of the hive, that decides on the swarm.  With this queen of ours it happens as with many a chief among men, who though he appear to give orders, is himself obliged to obey commands far more mysterious, far more inexplicable, than those he issues to his subordinates.  The hour once fixed, the spirit will probably let it be known at break of dawn, or the previous night, if indeed not two nights before; for scarcely has the sun drunk in the first drops of dew when a most unaccustomed stir, whose meaning the bee-keeper rarely will fail to grasp, is to be noticed within and around the buzzing city.  At times one would almost appear to detect a sign of dispute, hesitation, recoil.  It will happen even that for day after day a strange emotion, apparently without cause, will appear and vanish in this transparent, golden throng.  Has a cloud that we cannot see crept across the sky that the bees are watching; or is their intellect battling with a new regret?  Does a winged council debate the necessity of the departure?  Of this we know nothing; as we know nothing of the manner in which the spirit conveys its resolution to the crowd.  Certain as it may seem that the bees communicate with each other, we know not whether this be done in human fashion.  It is possible even that their own refrain may be inaudible to them:  the murmur that comes to us heavily laden with perfume of honey, the ecstatic whisper of fairest summer days that the bee-keeper loves so well, the festival song of labour that rises and falls