All bee-lovers must plead guilty to an inveterate partizanship, the writer frankly among their number. There is no laodiceanism in bee-craft; and, all the world over, it may be said that, where a few beehives have been got together, there is always to be found a red-hot enthusiast not far off. The word “freemasonry,” in the English tongue, has grown to be a synonym for the truest fraternity; but just as real, and almost as far-reaching, is the brotherhood among keepers of bees. No doubt, among themselves the tendency is rather to magnify the virtues and achievements of their charges: to be over-lavish of inference from too scanty or too isolated facts. And the proved impossibility of having anything to do with the honey-bee without being carried away sooner or later on a high wave of enthusiasm, makes any attempt at holding the balances truly between the zealous bee-lover and the interested but temperate-minded reader, a difficult and delicate task. Any writer on the honey-bee nowadays must be reckoned an ultra-specialist in an age of specialism; and here it is not easy to preserve the sense of proportion undimmed, especially for one admittedly speaking out of the ranks of beemanship, where all are aiders and abettors in ardour, impatient of any estimation falling short of high-water mark. The story of the Comb-Builders, however, sets none of the usual pitfalls in the way of the over-enthusiastic penman. In its soberest incident and least important detail it is so wonderful, that exuberance of language is as powerless to exaggerate, as a niggardly tongue to minimise, its true and due effect. If the ordering of the bee-commonwealth—the intricate systems of sanitation, division of labour, treatment of the queen and worker-larva, and the like—is subject for marvel, and seems infallibly to denote the possession of high faculties, a much greater degree of acumen must be conceded to the worker-bee when we come to consider her as the designer and builder of honeycomb.