known to remain in use for brood-raising as long as twenty years. But eventually they must become useless; and then, as bees do not, or cannot, remove old combs to make way for new, the community must leave for a new home, or gradually die out. Thus the age of the old hives was definitely limited. Modern beemanship has wrought many other changes in the life of the honey-bee in addition to creating the permanent hive-city. The number of bees in a single strong stock, housed in a modern frame hive, is probably three times as great as that of a wild colony. The work of the bee-master affects almost every aspect of bee-life, enlarging the scale and the scope of all that the bees attempt. The result of this is seen not only in an increased population and more extensive works, but in a change in the very systems of life. Plans that work very well on a small scale do not always succeed on a large. The sanitary problems of a city are necessarily very different from those of a village, in principle as well as in degree. And probably much of the ingenuity of system and device observable in modern hive-life is directly due to human agency, the new conditions introduced by the bee-master serving to educate the bees to greater effort and resource. The behaviour of these after-swarms offers a curious contrast to that of the first one. If it were possible to point to one fixed and invariable law in bee-life, it would be to the fact that a prime swarm will leave the hive only on a fine, warm day, and generally about noon. But casts and colts and fillies seem to take no count of time or weather, issuing just as the mood besets them, early or late, and caring nothing, apparently, for the conditions abroad. It is even on record that once a second swarm came off at midnight, when the moon was at the full and the weather very clear and warm. There seems altogether much more method in the madness that seizes on a colony swarming for the first time, and if thereafter the hive settles down to its old courses, the national character for sobriety and industry soon rehabilitates itself. But it is just the strength of this public inclination towards order and labour which varies so greatly in different hives. How matters are likely to go can be readily ascertained by setting careful watch on the hive from the day the first swarm leaves. There are sure to be several queen-cells, some capped over and almost ready to hatch out, and others in various stages of development. All these cells are constantly and assiduously guarded by the worker-bees, because directly one of the queens is hatched, her first thought is to make a speedy end to all future rivalry by murdering her sisters. She comes from her cell evidently spoiling for a fight, and imbued to the core with that inveterate hatred of her kind which is the ruling passion of her existence.