A curious and, to the expert, a startling outcome of these efforts to break down an old and almost universal custom in bee-life, is that the successful establishment of several mother-bees in a single hive appears to lessen the swarming impulse. Hives so treated do not send out a swarm so far as is known. One of the most disappointing experiences in bee-craft is to see prosperous stocks breaking themselves up into several hopelessly weak detachments just before the great honey-flow, when strength of numbers is the one vital thing; and if plurality of queens will prevent this vexatious evil, the old time-honoured custom is sure to go. The student of bee-life, watching the year’s work in the hive from its earliest beginnings, and marking its steady, cautious development, will readily see how the ancient idea of the mother-bee’s absolute monarchy gained its vogue. The deception of appearances is all but complete. Right in the heart of the winter-cluster he sees the queen bestirring herself to lay the first eggs, and the bees around her slowly awakening to the duty before them. With the passing of the weeks, he sees the brood-area steadily enlarging; the hitherto close-packed throng of workers gradually extending itself over a larger space of comb; the water-fetchers increasingly busy; the pollen-gathering bees already at work in the crocus-borders of the garden, where the year’s first gold and white and purple is gaily flaunting in the sun. He notes that the progress of the colony within the warm hive does not go by the calendar, but checks with each return of cold, and forges ahead only when the spring seems to be coming in right good earnest. He sees, even now, when February is waning and the hazel-catkins fill the bare woodland with a shimmer of emerald, that the colony still husbands its stores, eking them out with a long-sighted parsimony that shall be more than justified when the inevitable cold break comes in the flowery midst of the English May. It is impossible to overlook the evidence of a wise, directing mind through it all; and where should this be seated but in the brain of the single large bee, courted and fed and groomed unceasingly by the attendant host around her—she who is the teeming mother of past tens of thousands, and who carries in her body the seed of all the generations to come?