But as the young bees, leaving their homes, and flying ever northward, came first into temperate zones, and then into the fringe of Arctic influences, the conditions gradually changed. The perpetual sipping-garden was left behind; and a season came in each year—short at first, but inevitably lengthening—when there were no flowers. Hard necessity must have taught the bee, then, first to gather together with her kind for warmth during the cold season; and then, as this got longer and longer, to make some food-provision for winter days that would eke out endurance until the spring sun again wooed the earth into flower-giving. Thus the first communal bee-nests must have been evolved from the universal need of the race: the first common storehouses instituted: a host of unforeseen difficulties and side-issues encountered, and means for dealing with them contrived. The spirit of invention must have been busy then with the race, and taxed to the limit, of her resources. For never did Pandora open celestial casket upon earth with more redoubtable consequences, than when the Great Artificer set up the honey-bee as an examplar of city-building to the nomadic world of men. From the crowding together of the separate bee-families for mutual protection against the elements, to a complete and permanent fusion of life and interests, must have been only a step, as Nature works. But then there must have been stirring times—social upheavals, educative disasters, a cataclysmic war of sex. Bee-life must have been shaken to its very foundations. When and how the woman-bee first got the upper hand in the direction of affairs, it is unimportant to determine. But it is certain that she got it, and has kept it ever since. The population problem must have been the great, overwhelming one. With hundreds of prolific mothers in the hive, each having enough to do at home in rearing her own children, and a crowd of lazy, irresponsible drones who could do nothing but dance in the sunshine or go a-wooing, how were the daily needs of the hive to be satisfied, leaving out of account the provision that must be made for coming winter days? It was clearly a case of reform or annihilation; and it may be conceived that the woman-bees, in default of masculine initiative, took the reins into their own hands.