The Children's Life of the Bee

and hardships of a journey into a new and distant country. This act will always bring poverty with it and sometimes ruin; and the people who once were so happy are scattered abroad in obedience to a law that they recognize to be greater than their own happiness.

These things that happen to the bee are regarded by us in the way we regard most things that happen in the world. We note some of the bees' habits; we say, they do this, and do that, they work in such and such a way, this is how their queens are born; we observe that the workers are all females and that they swarm at a certain time. And having said this, we think that we know them, and ask nothing more. We watch them hastening from flower to flower, we see the constant movement within the hive; and we tell ourselves that we understand all about their life. But the moment that we try to come nearer the truth, to see more clearly, we find puzzling questions confronting us, questions as to what part is played by destiny and what part by will, how