The ways of the honey-bee are full of such deviations, due, perhaps, to the working of old ancestral memory rousing dimly in the midst of modern needs. The issue of a swarm may be nothing else than the survival of an old process, vital enough in its day, but, under the present civilised conditions of bee-life, lacking the whet of entire necessity. For, in all respects, the life of the bee, ancient as it is, is an evolved civilisation, and not a surviving, aboriginal state. It is conceivable that the foxes have their holes, and the birds their nests, much after the same fashion as in the days when Adam invented love-making. But the twentieth-century honey-bee is not of this kind. The communal habit itself may even have been a comparatively late introduction in her progress. It is possible to get some idea of the path she won for herself through the ages by studying the ways of creatures now living, but immeasurably less advanced than the bee. There are distant connections of hers—lonely little wood-wasps and others—which never associate with their kind, but get through the short summer hours in solitude, and die with the waning season, leaving the perpetuation of their species to the children they never see. The common wasp is nearer the honey-bee in development, but still infinitely far behind. The fecundated queen-wasp comes out of her winter hiding-place, fashions a cell or two in some hole in the ground, and deposits her first eggs, thus laying the foundation of a colony which, populous enough in the season, must nevertheless perish with the next winter chills. In the primæval tropics the honey-bees may have lived in separate families, each with its teeming mother, its indolent, lie-abed father—the Turveydrop of creation—and its bevy of youngsters, every one going out, when grown, to establish a home for itself. The modern bee-city, with its complicated systems and laws, and its innumerable multitudes, may have originated only when change of habitat and climate brought about the necessity for a new order of things. Living in perpetual warmth, in a land where blossom followed blossom in unending succession, there would be no need for such co-operation. The one little family, snugging close in its moss-roofed corner, could sustain its own temperature; and where there was unceasing array of nectar-producing flowers, foresight would have been folly: the winter larder would have been left to take care of itself.