"Mounts the glad chief! and, to the cheated eye, Ten thousand shuttles dart along the sky, As swift through ether rise the rushing swarms, Gay dancing to the beam their sun-bright forms, And each thin form, still lingering on the sight, Trails, as it shoots, a line of silver light. * * * * * High poised on buoyant wing, the thoughtful queen In gaze attentive views the varied scene, And soon her far-stretched ken discerns below The light laburnum lift her polished brow, Wave her green leafy ringlets o'er the glade, And seem to beckon to her friendly shade. Swift as the falcon's sweep, the monarch bends Her flight abrupt: the following host descends; Round the fine twig, like clustered grapes, they close In thickening wreaths, and court a short repose." As it often happens with after-swarms that more than one young queen is hatched before the start is made, the presence of these may cause irregular and puzzling behaviour in the bees. Langstroth mentions a case in which no less than eight queens must have started thus together, and Von Berlepsch once met with the same number; while Spitzner found a swarm with so many as twenty-one, but this happened fourteen days after the return to the hive of the first swarm, which had lost its queen. As mentioned in the section on "The Queen," it is not altogether a rare occurrence, though certainly the exception, for more than one monarch to settle down together. In one American case no fewer than five colonies once took up their quarters in a single large box, and remained there through a season "united yet divided." If, on the contrary, the queen is not in the swarm at all, the bees sometimes return at once to the hive, and sometimes they first institute a search for her majesty. In the famous but cruel experiment of Dr. Warder a whole swarm was starved to death by alternate deprivations and restorations of their queen repeated at intervals during five days. Of course in his day this devotion was attributed to personal regard. Exceptional cases of another kind are also not uncommon, in which a colony has made no preparation for swarming (by the formation of royal cells), but on the sudden arrival of warm weather it is enticed--Dzierzon says by the heat itself. Von Berlepsch by the contagious example of neighbouring hives--to carry out in a hurry that which ought to have received some ten days' preliminary care. "An internal revolution is made," says the Baron, "and they rush forth for the swarm. The queen, as becomes the pseudo-sovereign of a democratic monarchy, hastens to prove to her people their most obedient servant, and there the swarm is, hanging on the first convenient tree." On the following morning it will in such case be found that worker cells have been transformed into royal ones.