Observation of the ways of the honey-bee has been carried on for thousands of years. More books have been written about the bee than perhaps of all other creatures put together. And yet our knowledge of her powers and organisation must still be reckoned in its infancy. The microscopists have dissected her antenna and isolated all their various parts, but of the particular functions of these little or nothing is known at present. There are certain hairs, evenly distributed over the whole surface, which are presumably instruments of touch. But there are other hairs, or fine cones, which are hollow, enclosing a delicate nerve-fibre; hairs set loosely in a cavity; hairs curved and ringed, and of different lengths. Then there are mysterious pits and depressions, either open or covered with incredibly thin membranes, enshrining nerve-ends only just visible with the highest objectives. And the whole is linked up in an intricate nervous system that baffles every art and patience of research; while, when all has been investigated and described, no one is really any the wiser. The antenna are certainly touch-organs, and, in all likelihood, it is by their means that the bee hears and smells. Yet this only exhausts a few of their manifest possibilities. It is quite clear that we must admit the honey-bee to possess other senses than the five we know of; and—for a guess—some of these mysterious implements on her antenna may be thought-transmitters and -receivers on the wireless plan. The wonderful unanimity of action among bees may be due to the fact that they can exchange ideas through the air, as men have now at last come to do. The faculty of speech, hitherto held up as man’s insignia of lordship over the rest of creation, may be indeed a crude, archaic thing, compared with the mind-language of the honey-bees. There is another conceivable function which the antennæ of bees may perform—that of unerring and instant estimation of short distances. They may be delicate measuring instruments, not mechanically applied in the way of a foot-rule or metric scale, but registering dimensions inherently, as our ears record intensity of sound. This would go far to explain how honeycomb is built, how the cells are made all of the same shape and size, although hundreds of the mason-bees are at work on the structure, not only at the same moment, but in succession, each bee coming and going in the murmurous gloom of the hive, and beginning instantly and unhesitatingly at the point where her predecessor broke off. As the central division of the comb grew, expanding in all directions downward, and the cells were built out horizontally at the same time, the bee would know by her sense of dimension when the limit of each side in the hexagonal cell-base was reached, and would know the proper angle to turn off at in the laying of the next foundation-line.