CREATION BY EVOLUTION
settles down. But she does not quit the hive till nearly a week after her emergence from the cocoon. Yet all the time she is kept busy helping the older workers. When she first leaves the hive she may attempt only small flights. She has
_p192_bee_larva.png)
to learn her way home before she sets out to collect honey from the sugar glands of plants or pollen from the pollen sacs of flowers. She may make as many as a hundred flights a day (Fig. 9), bringing back beebread, or pollen, and honey, which are stored in separate cells and used as food for the inhabitants of the hive. Through long ages the flowers and the bees have evolved together and they are now fitted to each other as hand to glove.
_p192_worker_bee_in_flight.png)
It will be observed that the life of the whole colony is based on the principles of pure socialism, and that the social system is superior to ours. There is no unemployment in a hive; there are no strikes, no lock-outs. Except the drones everyone works continuously and at high pressure. A vast majority of the bees live as workers, entirely renouncing individual rights in their effort to continue the swarm—to make sure that another queen bee may always be ready when her predecessor dies. Self-preservation and self-propagation are completely transcended that the swarm—the social unit—may be continued. Sometimes bees act as foragers, collect-
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