For it is impossible to regard the incident of the swarm as only one more link in the chain of sober, calculating bee-wisdom. It is obviously a lapse, a general falling away from the all-wise, public polity. For a single hour in her drudging, joyless, perfect life, the worker-bee battens down all the virtues, and rages forth like the Sioux Indian to swill at the stream of forbidden love and laughter, unmindful of the cost. Just when the common self-abnegation is yielding its rich first-fruits of prosperity, and the hive is overflowing with its wealth of citizens and possessions, this fever comes among them, and spreads like a prairie fire. By all laws of prudence it is now, of all times, that every child of the Mother-State should stand by her mightily, to uphold her in the high place won for her by unending toil and innumerable lives. But old ancestral memory wakens, calling irresistibly. Nature, in the beginning of time, made the honey-bee to inhabit a tropic land, where there was no need for pent, cold-withstanding houses, nor any use in laying up provender for days of dearth, because the land flowed with perpetual honey. Bee-life in those far-off ages was all dancing in the sunshine, and the bee-woman had little to do but to fly to the nearest brimming flower-cup when her nurslings wanted food, But a cooling world, the ever northward trend of her race, and then the folly of her own wisdom—intellect turning upon itself—all combined to lose for her the old slothful paradise of plenty. The drone, reasoning inversely by the wisdom of his folly, made a better compromise with fate. He held to his life of ease and his gratuitous pleasures at all cost, and let his mate go her way undeterred, blinding his eyes to the new necessities. Work and responsibility gradually soured and sharpened and hardened the one, while dependence on his womenkind as insidiously changed the other into a creature of idleness and the senses. And when he came at last to realise the outcome of it all, it was too late. The matriarchal commonwealth was established, hedged round securely with a myriad poisoned blades. To live a drone had been his heart’s desire, and now dronehood, mere seminality, was allotted to him as a retribution. The things for which man lifts his unregarded prayer all his life through, might very well prove his fittest punishment, granted to him in the Hereafter: so little can man or drone distinguish between the enduring things of life and death.