The one in the whole multitude who alone has the full inheritance of her sex, the queen-bee, seems often at the fountain-head of the revolution. Sometimes, undoubtedly, it is she who first develops this longing, feverish unrest, and by little and little communicates it to the whole colony. Here the variability of bee-nature comes sharply into evidence. Some hives will show this restless spirit for many days before the swarm issues, while with others the great upheaval seems, as far as the mass of bees is concerned, to be a sudden unpremeditated thing occurring in the midst of the universal content and industry. The preparations for raising new queens are always taken in hand betimes, but probably this is the work of the far-seeing, sober old bees of the hive, with whom communism has become a settled and accepted calamity. The bees who will ultimately constitute the swarm may be supposed to nourish their secret desires from the first moment the queen shows signs of mutability; to neglect all their old tasks, first in heart and then in reality; and finally—when the queen’s mood has reached its culminating point, and her work in the hive is in virtual abeyance—to throw down plummet and trowel and hod, and rush forth in a wild, hilarious company, urged by a longing that they are as powerless to resist as to understand. In the study of bee-life one comes upon many questions, but seldom answers to fit all. If the queen’s fecundation takes place only once in her life, and nature intends this to suffice for her whole fruitful period, it is not easy to see why she should go out with the swarm at all. That she is not the inveterate recluse as generally believed, and that she does occasionally make short flights in the open during her laying career, is well proved. The desire, therefore, to see the light again after a long incarceration cannot be urged as her reason for going off with the swarm. A much more plausible notion is that the sexual spirit is again roused in the queen, just as it seems to be roused for the first time in the worker-bee; and that, with all, the journey is undertaken as a mating-flight, a faint re-echo of a racial custom long extinct, bearing the closest analogy to the marriage-swarm from the ant-hill. It must be borne in mind that, although the queen-bee is undoubtedly rendered capable of producing her kind of both sexes during several years, as the result of a single fertilisation, it cannot be incontestably held that she never again meets the drone under any circumstances. There is nothing in her physical organism to prevent a second coition, although with the drone this is impossible, for more reasons than the all-sufficient one—that he dies in his marriage-hour.