It is easy—nay, inevitable—in any close study of bee-life with the help of the modern observation-hive, to overset the ancient idea of absolute bee-monarchy under a single king or queen. But it is not so easy to determine how the general government of the colony is actually carried on. Innumerable small consultations on minor matters are seen to take place on every side during each moment of the busy day; but nothing like general communication is ever visible. And yet, how are the great national movements, such as the despatch of a swarm or the supersedure of an old queen, brought about; how are the various common crises of the State met, and provided for? The only rational inference seems to be that each worker is in herself the perfect evolved presentment of republicanism, in whom all imaginable difficulties in collective life have their best solution, tried and proved through the ages, and resorted to unerringly as a matter of course. Thus a common need is felt, and met instantaneously by a common, recognised expedient. The judgment of one is necessarily the judgment of all. Every problem of daily life, however intricate, is solved by the one device, brought to the fine point of perfection through the experience of countless generations, and applied by each individual to the common want, just as hunger impels all mankind to eat. Such a condition of affairs, even in a community of human beings, would imply a very high state of mental, if not of moral, development in the individual. It would mean entire negation of self in the interest of the common good. Even with all the forces of heredity at work, it would need stern ascetic training for the young, and for the transgressing adult a swift and merciless retribution, if the last dream of communism—the abolition of all law and penalty, and the establishment of a natural autonomy of well-doing—were ever to be realised in fact. And yet some such state of things appears to exist in the bee-commonwealth: the individual worker-bee seems to be the product of some such system carried on through an indefinite space of time. Order is preserved, public works go diligently forward, the clock of the national progress keeps time to the second, not because there is a central wisdom-force to plan, to govern, to awe recalcitrants, but because every worker-bee is herself the State in miniature, all propensities alien to the pure collective spirit having been long ago bred out of her by the sheer necessities of her case.