As regards this personal affection of which we have spoken, there is one word more to be said.  That such affection exists is certain, but it is certain also that its memory is exceedingly short-lived.  Dare to replace in her kingdom a mother whose exile has lasted some days, and her indignant daughters will receive her in such a fashion as to compel you hastily to snatch her from the deadly imprisonment reserved for unknown queens.  For the bees have had time to transform a dozen workers’ habitations into royal cells, and the future of the race is no longer in danger.  Their affection will increase, or dwindle, in the degree that the queen represents the future.  Thus we often find, when a virgin queen is performing the perilous ceremony known as the “nuptial flight,” of which I will speak later, that her subjects are so fearful of losing her that they will all accompany her on this tragic and distant quest of love.  This they will never do, however, if they be provided with a fragment of comb containing brood-cells, whence they shall be able to rear other queens.  Indeed, their affection even may turn into fury and hatred should their sovereign fail in her duty to that sort of abstract divinity that we should call future society, which the bees would appear to regard far more seriously than we.  It happens, for instance, at times, that apiarists for various reasons will prevent the queen from joining a swarm by inserting a trellis into the hive; the nimble and slender workers will flit through it, unperceiving, but to the poor slave of love, heavier and more corpulent than her daughters, it offers an impassable barrier.  The bees, when they find that the queen has not followed, will return to the hive, and scold the unfortunate prisoner, hustle and ill-treat her, accusing her of laziness, probably, or suspecting her of feeble mind.  On their second departure, when they find that she still has not followed, her ill-faith becomes evident to them, and their attacks grow more serious.  And finally, when they shall have gone forth once more, and still with the same result, they will almost always condemn her, as being irremediably faithless to her destiny and to the future of the race, and put her to death in the royal prison.

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It is to the future, therefore, that the bees subordinate all things; and with a foresight, a harmonious co-operation, a skill in interpreting events and turning them to the best advantage, that must compel our heartiest admiration, particularly when we remember in how startling and supernatural a light our recent intervention must present itself to them.  It may be said, perhaps, that in the last instance we have given, they place a very false construction upon the queen’s inability to follow them.  But would our powers of discernment be so very much subtler, if an intelligence of an order entirely different from our own, and served by a body so colossal that its movements were almost as imperceptible