The Life of the Bee 
46 
Let us now, in order to form a clearer 
conception of the bees’ intellectual power, 
consider their methods of intercommu- 
nication. There can be no doubting that 
they understand each other; and indeed it 
were surely impossible for a republic so con- 
siderable, wherein the labours are so varied 
and so marvellously combined, to subsist 
amid the silence and spiritual isolation of 
so many thousand creatures. They must 
be able, therefore, to give expression to 
thoughts and feelings by means either of a 
phonetic vocabulary, or, more probably, of 
some kind of tactile language or magnetic 
intuition, corresponding perhaps to senses 
and properties of matter that are wholly 
unknown to us. And such intuition well 
might lodge in the mysterious antenne— 
containing, in the case of the workers, 
according to Cheshire’s calculation, twelve 
thousand tactile hairs and five thousand 
*‘ smell-hollows ”»— wherewith they probe 
and fathom the darkness. For the mutual 
1390 
