The Life of the Bee 
in faith and mystery and hope, why 
do your myriad virgins consent to a task 
that no human slave has ever accepted? 
Another spring might be theirs, another 
summer, were they only a little less waste- 
ful of strength, a little less self-forgetful 
in their ardour for toil; but at the mag- 
nificent 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 
charming errors of the ancients, who 
looked on nature with eyes still dazzled 
by the presence of imaginary gods. 
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