82 THE LIFE OF THE BEE 



have seen thousands strained out from the syrups in which 

 they had perished ; thousands more alighting even in the 

 boiling sw^eets ; the floors covered and window^s darkened 

 with bees, some crawling, others flying, and others still so 

 completely besmeared as to be able neither to crawl nor 

 to fly — not one bee in ten able to carry home its ill-gotten 

 spoils, and yet the air filled with new hosts of thoughtless 

 comers ! " This, however, seems to me no more conclusive 

 than might be the spectacle of a battlefield, or of the 

 ravages of alcoholism, to a superhuman observer bent on 

 establishing the limits of human understanding. Indeed, less 

 so, perhaps ; for the situation of the bee, when compared 

 with our own, is strange in this world. It was intended to 

 live in the midst of an indifferent and unconscious nature, 

 and not by the side of an extraordinary being who is for ever 

 disturbing the most constant laws, and producing grandiose, 

 inexplicable phenomena. In the natural order of things, in 

 the monotonous life of the forest, the madness Langstroth 

 describes would be possible only were some accident suddenly 

 to destroy a hive full of honey. But in this case even 

 there would be no fatal glass, no boiling sugar or cloying 

 syrup ; no death or danger, therefore, other than that to 

 which every animal is exposed while seeking its prey. 



Should we be more successful than they in preserving 

 our presence of mind if some strange power were at every 

 step to ensnare our reason ? Let us not be too hasty in 

 condemning the bees for the folly whereof we are the 

 authors, or in deriding their intellect, which is as poorly 

 equipped to foil our artifices as our own would be to foil 

 those of some superior creature unknown to us to-day, but 



