THE old “swarm in May,” beloved of ancient beemen, is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Modern hives and modern methods, although they have not as yet achieved their main intent of abolishing natural swarming altogether, yet tend to bring this extraordinary ebullition of hive-life to its fulfilment later and later in each year. Far from being a virtue, as of old, an early swarm, or indeed any swarm at all, is now accounted a misfortune, even a downright disgrace, in scientific beemanship. And yet the bees, though easy to discourage, are hard to teach. In spite of roomy hives and a watchful bee-master ready to give them an unbroken succession of young and fertile queens, and a whole houseful of new furniture at a moment’s notice, still the bees go on playing this mad game of wholesale truantry, and still the bee-keeper must stand looking hopelessly on from the midst of his elaborate appliances, while his property sings about his ears, or wings away into the upper skies, irrevocable as last year’s mill-water. [Picture: A swarm in May] Beemen call it the swarming fever; and fever it is in very truth. The reasons for it have long ago been crystallised into exact and accepted phrases. An overcrowded condition of the hive; the desire of the bees to get rid of a failing queen; the excitement of the queen herself at the menace of coming rivals; the natural instinct of colonies to increase and multiply—anything but the one all-sufficient and obvious reason, that bees swarm because they suddenly and intensely desire it. The story of the Sioux Indian,—won for civilisation from boyhood, over-educated and overrefined, decorated with a high college-degree and adorning a great pulpit, and then casting it all to the four winds, stripping and painting himself, and raging away with his kind on the war-trail,—has a near parallel in the behaviour of bees at swarming-time. Instinct could never be a party to such an inconsequent, outrageous, brilliantly reckless, joyous proceeding. But it is ever in the way of reason to be splendidly unreasonable at times, and here the honey-bee shows herself the true child of her origins. From a stern, self-elected destiny-maker, callously pressing to the forefront of life over all obstacles of heart and hearth, she changes back, for the nonce, into the aboriginal bee-woman, thoughtless, pleasure-loving, improvident, spending the garnered treasure of laborious days in the one mad moment’s frolic.