Here, then, they have shaken off the torpor of winter. The queen
started laying again in the very first days of February, and the
workers have flocked to the willows and nut-trees, gorse and
violets, anemones and lungworts. Then spring invades the earth, and
cellar and stream with honey and pollen, while each day beholds the
birth of thousands of bees. The overgrown males now all sally forth
from their cells, and disport themselves on the combs; and so
crowded does the too prosperous city become that hundreds of belated
workers, coming back from the flowers towards evening, will vainly
seek shelter within, and will be forced to spend the night on the
threshold, where they will be decimated by the cold. Restlessness
seizes the people, and the old queen begins to stir. She feels that
a new destiny is being prepared. She has religiously fulfilled her
duty as a good creatress; and from this duty done there result only
tribulation and sorrow. An invincible power menaces her
tranquillity; she will soon be forced to quit this city of hers,
where she has reigned. But this city is her work, it is she,
herself. She is not its queen in the sense in which men use the
word. She issues no orders; she obeys, as meekly as the humblest of
her subjects, the masked power, sovereignly wise, that for the
present, and till we attempt to locate it, we will term the "spirit
of the hive." But she is the unique organ of love; she is the mother
of the city. She founded it amid uncertainty and poverty. She has
peopled it with her own substance; and all who move within its
walls--workers, males, larvae, nymphs, and the young princesses
whose approaching birth will hasten her own departure, one of them
being already designed as her successor by the "spirit of the
hive"--all these have issued from her flanks.