We enter the hive for our third visit with the bees. The guards at the door eye us with suspicion. The air in the hive is hot and sultry. When we wander through the hive, we find the storerooms overflowing with sweet, golden combs of honey. The nurseries are crowded with young bees. New queen cells hang from the combs. Orderliness is lacking. The bees are restless and not working as usual. We sense that another strange event will occur.

We inquire from a bee why everything is in disorder. She hastily replies that the old queen will soon take many of the bees to a new home and that a new queen for this hive will be born. We stand aside to watch the bees.

In all the corridors of the hive the bees are preparing to leave. Each one is gorging herself with honey. Each bee must take enough honey along to last five days and to make wax from it for their new home.

Our busy little friends who will leave the protection of the hive may meet many dangers in the outside world. Rain, cold or high winds may kill them. Yet they bravely prepare to go, and they will die rather than ask help from another hive or return to their old home.

We wonder why the bees will leave a home which is so full of the fruits of their labor. Maybe an over-crowded hive is the only reason why they will swarm out to find a new home. Maybe it is just plain spring fever. Anyway, this is one time in the bees' career when they leave hard work and go on a great adventure.

Now we must move out of the way. Dark swirling waves of swarming bees make the hive a turmoil of sound and motion. They seem different from the friendly little workers which we saw flying from flower to flower. Today the bees seem wild. They fly in circles around the polished walls of their home. They weave in and out like a turbulent stream cascading over a rocky river bed.

The queen flies around in wild abandon as though she too had lost her head. Is she helping the bees to swarm, or is she wildly trying to prevent it? We feel that the bees are swarming without her consent.

A few workers who will not leave with the swarm, come and go as usual. We are told that they will stay behind to care for the brood cells and to await the birth of a new queen. After the birth of a new queen, the work in the hive will go on as peaceably as before.

The bees about to swarm are enjoying their one holiday in life. Perchance they are celebrating the final collection of their vast store of honey. They eat their fill and play to their heart's content. Like little children getting ready for a trip to the beach, they go outside and come back in again to see if the queen mother is ready to leave the hive.

Now the bees are ready to depart. The city gates open and the swarm comes forth like black streamers of smoke. It hovers over the hive for a moment and then mounts upward into the sky, -a humming blanket of whirring little people. The madly flying bees swirl across the sky direct to some tree or branch which had been chosen by the scouts who had gone out before the swarm was ready to leave. The queen comes to rest upon a tree limb, and soon layers of bees settle around her. This ends the first part of the flight. They stop for a while to rest before going on to the new home.

After a period of ease the bees become restless. The scouts tell them of a place which will make a good home. After careful deliberation, the swarm, like a flight of roaring airplanes, takes off for a chosen hollow tree or a hole in the wall, -back to the wilds.