The analogy is helpful in the consideration of the mechanisms brought into play by the social habit. The community of the honey bee bears a close resemblance to the body of a complex animal. The capacity for actual structural specialization of the individuals in the interests of the hive has been remarkable and has gone far, while at the same time co-ordination has been stringently enforced, so that each individual is actually absorbed into the community, expends all its activities therein, and when excluded from it is almost as helpless as a part of the naked flesh of an animal {106} detached from its body. The hive may, in fact, without any very undue stretch of fantasy, be described as an animal of which all the individual cells have retained the power of locomotion. When one watches the flight of a swarm of bees its unanimity and directness very easily produce the illusion that one is witnessing the migration of a single animal usually sedentary but at times capable of undertaking journeys with a formidable and successful energy. This new animal differs from the other animals of the metazoa which it has outdistanced in the race of evolution, not merely in its immense power, energy, and flexibility, but also in the almost startling fact that it has recovered the gift of immortality which seemed to have been lost with its protozoal ancestors. The extent to which the hive makes use of the powers of its individuals is the measure of the completeness with which the social habit is developed in it. The worker bee has practically no activities which are not directly devoted to the hive, and yet she goes about her ceaseless tasks in a way that never fails to impress the observer with its exuberant energy and even its appearance of joyfulness. It is thought that the average worker bee _works herself to death_ in about two months. That is a fact which can scarcely fail to arouse, even in the least imaginative, at any rate a moment of profound contemplation.