if the harvest fail, or the hive be enlarged.  Often they will be retained so long as the young queen have not accomplished, or succeeded in, her marriage flight,—­to be at once annihilated when she returns, trailing behind her, trophy-wise, the infallible sign of her impregnation.  Who shall say where the wisdom resides that can thus balance present and future, and prefer what is not yet visible to that which already is seen?  Where the anonymous prudence that selects and abandons, raises and lowers; that of so many workers makes so many queens, and of so many mothers can make a people of virgins?  We have said elsewhere that it lodged in the “Spirit of the Hive,” but where shall this spirit of the hive be looked for if not in the assembly of workers?  To be convinced of its residence there, we need not perhaps have studied so closely the habits of this royal republic.  It was enough to place under the microscope, as Dujardin, Brandt, Girard, Vogel, and other entomologists have done, the little uncouth and careworn head of the virgin worker side by side with the somewhat empty skull of the queen and the male’s magnificent cranium, glistening with its twenty-six thousand eyes.  Within this tiny head we should find the workings of the vastest and most magnificent brain of the hive:  the most beautiful and complex, the most perfect, that, in another order and with a different organisation, is to be found in nature after that of man.  Here again, as in every quarter where the scheme of the world is known to us, there where the brain is, are authority and victory, veritable strength and wisdom.  And here again it is an almost invisible atom of this mysterious substance that organises and subjugates matter, and is able to create its own little triumphant and permanent place in the midst of the stupendous, inert forces of nothingness and death.*

The brain of the bee, according to the calculation of Dujardin, constitutes the 1-174th part of the insect’s weight, and that of the ant the 1-296th.  On the other hand the peduncular parts, whose development usually keeps pace with the triumphs the intellect achieves over instinct, are somewhat less important in the bee than in the ant.  It would seem to result from these estimates—­which are of course hypothetical, and deal with a matter that is exceedingly obscure—­that the intellectual value of the bee and the ant must be more or less equal.

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And now to return to our swarming hive, where the bees have already given the signal for departure, without waiting for these reflections of ours to come to an end.  At the moment this signal is given, it is as though one sudden mad impulse had simultaneously flung open wide every single gate in the city; and the black throng issues, or rather pours forth in a double, or treble, or quadruple jet, as the number of exits may be; in a tense, direct, vibrating, uninterrupted stream that at once dissolves and melts into space, where the myriad transparent, furious wings weave a