The Swarm 
place in the midst of the stupendous, inert 
forces of nothingness and death. 
37 
And now to return to our swarming 
hive, where the bees have already given 
the signal for departure, without waiting 
for these reflections of ours to come to 
an end. At the moment this signal is 
given, it is as though one sudden mad 
impulse had simultaneously flung open 
wide every single gate in the city; and the 
black throng issues, or rather pours forth, 
in a double, or treble, or quadruple jet, as 
the number of exits may be—in a tense, 
direct, vibrating, uninterrupted stream that 
at once dissolves and melts into space, where 
1 The brain of the bee, according to 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 of 
course hypothetical, and deal with a matter that is ex- 
ceedingly obscure—that the intellectual value of the bee 
and the ant must be more or less equal. 
99 
