The great door-key, a ponderous, antiquated piece of metal, beats out its clanging note, and the swarm lifts higher and higher into the blue. Gradually the sombre mist of bees draws closer together, looking now like a little dark cloud strayed from a forgotten summer storm. Now it sails slowly northward, and lightens, as the sunlight is caught by the beating wings as in a net of silver; and now it veers away into the very eye of the sun, and changes into black, revolving tracery again; whirring wheels within wheels of insect-life, spinning-wheels making thread to weave the garments of a whole nation, and humming as never spinning-wheels hummed before.
But the beginning of the end is nigh; the time of singing is nearly over. The old beeman stops his weird tom-tomming, throws down key and pan, and points to the topmost branch of a young apple-sapling. You see a little black knot of bees clinging to it no larger than a pigeon’s egg. A moment later, and it has grown to the size of a double fist, and another moment sees it twice this size again, as the flying bees stream towards it from all directions. Now it is as big as a quart measure, and the branch is slowly bending down under its weight. In an incredibly short space of time the whole swarm has joined the cluster; they hang together in a long, brown, glistening, cigar-shaped mass, well-nigh touching the ground, and the wild, merry music is over for good.
Gently swaying in the sunlight, lifeless and inert but for a few restless bees that hum about it, the sight of a settled swarm has an almost uncanny effect on most observers. A little before, the whole garden was filled with its deafening, joyous hubbub; now a strange silence has fallen, and it is impossible to dissociate from its present state the idea of an abject depression and disillusionment, as though the whole thing had been but a mad escapade, of which the bees were now heartily ashamed. If we may conceive the issue of a swarm to be a freak of ancestral memory, the sudden irresistible impulse to follow an old racial habit, long obsolete, it is not difficult to account for the obvious change of mind that has now come over the absconding host. Packed within the hive in a feverish, surging multitude, disabilities were not self-evident as they are now, tried in the light of day.