You must not forget the queen-bee here. She alone, it must be remembered, persists year in and year out, while generation after generation of her children grow up and die about her—a hundred thousand of them, may-be, in each twelve-month, thousands even between one single summer dawn and the dusk of the western sky. Methuselah of old, on the more moderate human scale, must have had some such experience—must have divined the broader plan of life from the incessant repetitions of chance and change that passed before him. The power to generalise into symbols comes only to the ancient of days; and he of all men had learnt to fathom, to estimate, to winnow out the sober drab grain from the glittering, rainbow chaff of life. Over and over again he must have kept the true true to itself with one wise word, and turned back the false, dazzled and discomfited, with one flash from his mirror of the ages. He was a living history-book, where all men might read the common drift and outcome of life; and as a record of the hive’s story, a living archive for its plans, its systems, its ideals, the mother-bee may exist to day—she who, in comparison with its ever coming and going thousands, is an age-old, imperishable thing. And so you may think of her, in the short days of December twilight, or in the interminable night-darkness full of the raging of the winter wind, gathering her children about her, and telling them tales of their forbears’ prowess; teaching them old bee-songs which have but the one refrain of work and winning; and never forgetting her own little story—of the one brief hour of her love-flight and marriage, bought and paid for by widowhood lasting her whole life. CHAPTER XVI THE MODERN BEE-FARM IT is well enough to consider the scientific side of hive-life for its intrinsic interest, to treat it for what it really is—one of the most absorbing studies available for leisure hours. But the honey-bee is something more than a wonder-maker, or a peg on which to hang dilettante moralisms. Rightly treated and exactly understood, she can be made of great use in the world.