IT is true that all bee-keepers are enthusiasts, and true that long years spent in the companionship of the hives invariably create a fearless fellowship, a prime understanding between the bee-master and his legions. But it is equally true that the longer you study the nature of the honey-bee, the less enamoured you become of certain of her ways. In the minds of old beemen there grows up, as the years glide, a sort of awe of her. She is so manifestly a power, supreme in her little world. She is so courageous, resourceful, brainy. All the weaknesses and compromises, and most of the pleasures, have long ago been driven out of her life, seemingly by her own act and will; yet, in doing this, she has but refined the science of citizenship to its pure elements. Her entire unselfishness, her readiness to sacrifice her individual good for the good of the State, are as unquestionable as they are changeless. The hive-polity, taken as a whole, is so admirable, and compares so advantageously with certain human efforts in the same way, that you are apt to exalt all her qualities into virtues; and to conclude that a far-seeing, wise benevolence must have gone to the making of the perfect Bee-State, instead of the cold, undeviating logic that alone has fashioned it. This remorseless smelting-down of life into the set moulds of principle, without mercy and without reproach, has a cumulative effect on the mind of the observer; and sooner or later, though he will early lose his fear of her sting, he will develop a very real, but vague, awe of the honey-bee in another way. Just as Moses Rusden, the King’s bee-master, held up the life of the hive as Nature’s evidence of the Divine will in earthly monarchy, so the latter-day student is often constrained to ask himself whether the bee-commonwealth does not point an authoritative moral in another way. Here is a State—only a mimic one, but still not a negligible example—where several of the most fiercely-debated questions of modern human life are seen in long adopted and perfected working-order, and seen in their fullness of result. Any attempt at a serious comparison between men and women, and the drone and worker-bee, would justly lay the writer open to the charge of grotesque trifling; but there is more than a fanciful analogy between the principles on which all civilisations must be based, whether they are insect or human. It cannot be denied that the communal life of the honey-bee is a high civilisation; that it has grown to be what it is to-day through ages of necessity; that the one sex has the other under a complete and terrible subjection, for which, and for the privilege of all power, the dominant sex has paid a terrible price.