The Life of the Bee 
you have acquired, that we still have to 
conquer? And if you have truly resolved 
these problems, acquired these certitudes, by 
the aid of some blind and primitive impulse 
and not through the intellect, then to what 
enigma, more insoluble still, are you not 
urging us on? Little city abounding in 
faith and mystery and hope, why do your 
myriad virgins consent to a task that no 
human slave has ever accepted? Another 
spring would be theirs, another summer, 
were they only a little less wasteful of 
strength, a little less forgetful of self, in 
their ardour for toil; but at the magnifi- 
cent moment when the flowers all cry to 
them they seem to be stricken with the 
fatal ecstasy of work, and in less than five 
weeks they almost all perish, their wings 
broken, their bodies shrivelled and covered 
with wounds. 
« Tantus amor florum, et generandi gloria mellis,”’ 
cries Virgil in the fourth book of the 
Georgics, wherein he devotes himself to 
the bees, and hands down to us the charm- 
ing errors of the ancients, who looked on 
56 
