The Foundation of the City 
I have seen thousands strained out from the 
syrups in which they had perished; thou- 
sands more alighting even in the boiling 
sweets; the floors covered and windows 
darkened with bees, some crawling, others 
flying, and others still so completely be- 
smeared 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 con- 
clusive than might be the spectacle of a 
battlefield, or of the ravages of alcoholism, 
to a superhuman observer bent on establish- 
ing 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 un- 
conscious nature, and not by the side of an 
extraordinary being who is for ever disturb- 
ing 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 
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