stubbornness in their defence. Then having freed himself from his
most dangerous vices, each individual has to acquire a certain
number of more and more painful virtues. Among the humble-bees, for
instance, the workers do not dream of renouncing love, whereas our
domestic bee lives in a state of perpetual chastity. And indeed we
soon shall show how much more she has to abandon, in exchange for
the comfort and security of the hive, for its architectural,
economic, and political perfection; and we shall return to the
evolution of the hymenoptera in the chapter devoted to the progress
of the species.






II

THE SWARM





[9]

WE will now, so as to draw more closely to nature, consider the
different episodes of the swarm as they come to pass in an ordinary
hive, which is ten or twenty times more populous than an observation
one, and leaves the bees entirely free and untrammelled.