1 66 THE LIFE OF THE BEE 



of their life. Far away, caressing their idleness in the midst 

 of the flowers, the males have beheld the apparition, have 

 breathed the magnetic perfume that spreads from group to 

 group, till every apiary near is instinct with it. Immediately 

 crowds collect and follow her into the sea of gladness, whose 

 limpid boundaries ever recede. She, drunk with her wings, 

 obeying the magnificent law of the race that chooses her 

 lover, and enacts that the strongest alone shall attain her in 

 the solitude of the ether, she rises still ; and, for the first time 

 in her life, the blue morning air rushes into her stigmata, 

 singing its song, like the blood of heaven, in the myriad tubes 

 of the tracheal sacs, nourished on space, that fill the centre of 

 her body. She rises still. A region must be found unhaunted 

 by birds, that else might profane the mystery. She rises still ; 

 and already the ill-assorted troop below are dwindling and 

 falling asunder. The feeble, infirm, the aged, unwelcome, 

 ill fed, who have flown from inactive or impoverished cities — 

 these renounce the pursuit and disappear in the void. Only 

 a small, indefatigable cluster remain, suspended in infinite opal. 

 She summons her wings for one final effort ; and now the 

 chosen of incomprehensible forces has reached her, has seized 

 her, and, bounding aloft with united impetus, the ascending 

 spiral of their intertwined flight whirls for one second in the 

 hostile madness of love. 



87 

 Most creatures have a vague belief that a very precarious 

 hazard, a kind of transparent membrane, divides death from 

 love, and that the profound idea of Nature demands that the 



