372 CELL INTELLIGENCE THE CAUSE OF EVOLUTION 



make such bees work, it is necessary systematically to 

 take from them what they have gathered. Like the 

 workers in many tropical countries, who disappear when 

 they have enough money to last them for a day, the 

 tropical bee loses the habit of labor. 



There are almost 5,000 varieties of wild bees and 

 among them patient study would undoubtedly discover 

 peculiarities as numerous as those among the different 

 kinds of human beings. You may even find among the 

 bees primitive, ignorant, uncivilized individuals, corre- 

 sponding with the Bushmen of the desert or even with 

 the cave man of a hundred thousand years ago. One 

 little wild bee called the Prosopis you may see flying 

 about in the bushes. If you knew bees and could study 

 these they would seem to you as different from the pros- 

 perous bee of the hive as a half naked bush-woman seems 

 different from the comfortable lady in her furs. But that 

 little wild bee, half starved and ignorant, is the ancestor 

 of all the civilized bees. And what is more important, as 

 the scientists point out, it is probably to her that we owe 

 nearly all our flowers and fruit. A hundred thousand 

 varieties of plants would disappear from earth if the bees 

 did not visit them, carrying the pollen. 



"We human beings would understand ourselves better 

 if we knew more about the insects that live in organized 

 civilization at our feet or in the air above us. In propor- 

 tion to their power the bees and ants are infinitely more 

 highly civilized than we are. They are as far above us 

 as the careful, painstaking worker and saver is above the 

 worthless tramp and idler. For thousands upon thou- 

 sands of years before men had dreamed of civilization or 

 settled in great communities, the bees and ants were 

 working out their problems of co-operation, organiza- 

 tion, defense and attack. Aristotle wrote about the bees 



