I have said that the nearest neighbors of Fuzzy's family are a lot of black German bees, housed in a larger house than Fuzzy's, but one also with glass sides so that we can see what goes on inside. The door of the house opens through the same large window as that of Fuzzy's house, but the foragers coming back from their long trips rarely make a mistake in the doors, the Germans coming to their door and the Italians to theirs. The German community is much the larger, there being probably thirty or forty thousand workers in it, although of course only one queen, and only a few hundred drones. Sometimes the foragers, both Germans and Italians, make the mistake of coming to the wrong window of the room in which their houses are. There are five large windows all alike in the west wall of this room, and often we find our bees bumping against the other windows, especially the ones just next to the right one. They can't, of course, see in through these windows because the room is much darker than outside, and so all that the home-coming bees can see as they approach the building is a row of similar windows separated from each other by similar spaces of buffy stone. And keen as our bees are in finding their way straight to their hives from distant flower-fields, this repetition of similar windows seems to confuse some of them. But what I started to tell about is something that happened between the neighboring bee-houses quite different from the troubles of the bees finding their way home. It was something that gave Mary and me the principal excitement that we had in all our many days of watching bees. Mary and I do not want to say that the German bees knew that a third of Fuzzy's community had swarmed out and gone away. Though how they could help knowing it really seems more a puzzle, for there was excitement and buzzing and window-sill covered and air full of bees enough to have told everybody within a rod of what was going on in the Italian house. But it was true that Fuzzy's community had never been troubled at all seriously by the belligerent Germans, until after it had been much reduced in strength by the loss of one-third of its members. And then this trouble did come, and came soon. So it looks as if the Germans realized the weakness of their neighbors. But perhaps not. Just as our other exciting time beginning with the piping of the new queen and lasting until the subsequent swarming was a discovery of Mary's, so with this new time of high excitement; high excitement I may say both on our part and the bees'. Mary was in the room where the bees are, although not at the moment watching them, when she heard a sound of violent buzzing and humming. It grew quickly louder and shriller, and in a moment both communities were in an uproar.