THE NATURAL 



with moveable combs. The bees will never know. 

 Bees are stupid. 



But we who see the limits of intelligence in bees, 

 should consider the limits of our own. There are limits; 

 it is possible to conceive brains who observing us, would 

 say: men are stupid. All intelligence is limited; it is 

 just this shock against the limit, against the wall, which 

 by the pain it causes, engenders consciousness. We are 

 not to laugh too much at the bees who gaily furnish the 

 mobile combs of their improved hives. We are perhaps 

 the slaves of a master who exploits us, and who will re- 

 main forever unknown. The polygamy, or if one wish, 

 the polyandry of bees, pretext for this digression, is 

 then purely virtual; it is in the state of possibility, but 

 it will never be realized, since the fecundity of the queen 

 is assured by a single act. The excessive multiplicity of 

 males corresponds doubtless to an ancient order in which 

 the females were more numerous. In any case only 

 two or three males out of about a thousand, are used, 

 or let us say ten, if you wish to suppose very frequent 

 swarming, this demonstrates that one must not pre- 

 judge the habits of an animal specie by the over- 

 abundance of one sex or another, and that, in a general 

 fashion, one must place natural logic above our human 

 logic, derived from mathematical logic. Facts in nature 

 are connected by a thousand knots of which no one 

 is solvable by human logic. When one of these tangles 

 is unravelled before our eyes we marvel at the simplicity 

 of its mechanism, we think we understand, we make gen- 

 eralities, we prepare to open neighbouring mysteries with 

 the same key: illusion. One always has to begin again 

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