The Life of the Bee | Page 7

of aged

philosopher had retired; an old man somewhat akin to Virgil's--
"Man equal to kings, and approaching the gods;"
whereto Lafontaine might have added,--
"And, like the gods, content and at rest."
Here had he built his refuge, being a little weary; not disgusted, for the
large aversions are unknown to the sage; but a little weary of
interrogating men, whose answers to the only interesting questions one
can put concerning nature and her veritable laws are far less simple
than those that are given by animals and plants. His happiness, like the
Scythian philosopher's, lay all in the beauties of his garden; and
best-loved and visited most often, was the apiary, composed of twelve
domes of straw, some of which he had painted a bright pink, and some
a clear yellow, but most of all a tender blue; having noticed, long
before Sir John Lubbock's demonstrations, the bees' fondness for this
colour.
These hives stood against the wall of the house, in the angle formed by
one of those pleasant and graceful Dutch kitchens whose earthenware
dresser, all bright with copper and tin, reflected itself through the open
door on to the peaceful canal. And the water, burdened with these
familiar images beneath its curtain of poplars, led one's eyes to a calm
horizon of mills and of meadows.
Here, as in all places, the hives lent a new meaning to the flowers and
the silence, the balm of the air and the rays of the sun. One seemed to
have drawn very near to the festival spirit of nature. One was content to
rest at this radiant crossroad, where the aerial ways converge and divide
that the busy and tuneful bearers of all country perfumes unceasingly
travel from dawn unto dusk. One heard the musical voice of the garden,
whose loveliest hours revealed their rejoicing soul and sang of their
gladness. One came hither, to the school of the bees, to be taught the
preoccupations of all-powerful nature, the harmonious concord of the
three kingdoms, the indefatigable organisation of life, and the lesson of
ardent and disinterested work; and another lesson too, with a moral as
good, that the heroic workers taught there, and emphasised, as it were,
with the fiery darts of their myriad wings, was to appreciate the
somewhat vague savour of leisure, to enjoy the almost unspeakable
delights of those immaculate days that revolved on themselves in the
fields of space, forming merely a transparent globe, as void of memory

as the happiness without alloy.
[5]
In order to follow, as simply as possible, the life of the bees through the
year, we will take a hive that awakes in the spring and duly starts on its
labours; and then we shall meet, in their natural order, all the great
episodes, viz.: the formation and departure of the swarm, the
foundation of the new city, the birth, combat and nuptial flight of the
young queens, the massacre of the males, and finally, the return of the
sleep of winter. With each of these episodes there will go the necessary
explanations as to the laws, habits, peculiarities and events that produce
and accompany it; so that, when arrived at the end of the bee's short
year, which extends only from April to the last days of September, we
shall have gazed upon all the mysteries of the palace of honey. Before
we open it, therefore, and throw a general glance around, we only need
say that the hive is composed of a queen, the mother of all her people;
of thousands of workers or neuters who are incomplete and sterile
females; and lastly of some hundreds of males, from whom one shall be
chosen as the sole and unfortunate consort of the queen that the
workers will elect in the future, after the more or less voluntary
departure of the reigning mother.
[6]
The first time that we open a hive there comes over us an emotion akin
to that we might feel at profaning some unknown object, charged
perhaps with dreadful surprise, as a tomb. A legend of menace and peril
still clings to the bees. There is the distressful recollection of her sting,
which produces a pain so characteristic that one knows not wherewith
to compare it; a kind of destroying dryness, a flame of the desert
rushing over the wounded limb, as though these daughters of the sun
had distilled a dazzling poison from their father's angry rays, in order
more effectively to defend the treasure they gather from his beneficent
hours.
It is true that were some one who neither knows nor respects the
customs and character of the bee suddenly to fling open the hive, it
would turn at once into a burning bush of heroism and anger; but the
slight amount