Why won't my lines distribute evenly

[Snowdog63]

What am I doing wrong? I have a load of lines that I want to distibute evenly but the button doesn't seem to be doing anything. They're all the same apart from the colour & they're all in the same group.

I know Illustrator can be quite fussy about some things, but I can't figure out which thing it's being fussy about now.

Is it that I am selecting via the group node & illustator sees this as a single object & it has nothing to distribute it with? Surely it's not expecting me to select each of the lines separately? What if there were ten thousand? That would be very silly.

But obviously I'm not getting it so can anyone help?

[Snowdog63]

EDIT: I ungrouped them, did the distribute & re-grouped them.

I had to re-name the group to what it was before that just seems like an crazy workaround to me. Why wouldn't illustrator know that it's the lines in the group that I want to distribute, especially if no other group was selected?