64 THE LIFE OF THE BEE 



already is seen ? Where the anonymous prudence that selects 

 and abandons, raises and lowers ; that of so many workers 

 makes so many queens, and of so many mothers can make 

 a people of virgins ? We have said elsewhere that it lodged 

 in the "spirit of the hive," but where shall this spirit of 

 the hive be looked for if not in the assembly of workers ? 

 To be convinced of its residence there we need not perhaps 

 have studied so closely the habits of this royal republic. It 

 was enough to place under the microscope, as Dujardin, 

 Brandt, Girard, Vogel, and other entomologists have done, 

 the little uncouth and careworn head of the virgin worker 

 side by side with the somewhat empty skull of the queen 

 and the male's magnificent cranium, glistening with its twenty- 

 six thousand eyes. Within this tiny head we should find 

 the workings of the vastest and most magnificent brain of 

 the hive : the most beautiful and complex, the most perfect 

 that, in another order and with a different organisation, is to 

 be found in nature after that of man. Here again, as in 

 every quarter where the scheme of the world is known to 

 us, there where the brain is are authority and victory, wisdom 

 and veritable strength. And here again it is an almost invisible 

 atom of this mysterious substance that organises and subjugates 

 matter, and is able to create its own little triumphant and 

 permanent place in the midst of the stupendous, inert forces 

 of nothingness and death.^ 



' The brain of the bee, according lo the calculation of Dujardin, constitutes the 174th 

 part of the insect's weight, and that of the ant the 296th. On the other hand, the 

 peduncular parts, whose development usually keeps pace with the triumphs the intellect 

 achieves over instinct, are somewhat less important in the bee than in the ant. It would 

 seem to result from these estimates — which are cf course hypothetical, and deal with 

 a matter that is exceedingly obscure — that the intellectual value of the bee and the ant 

 must be more or less equal. 



