The Life of the Bee 
most particular care. From that moment, 
possessed of a dual sex, having within her 
an inexhaustible male, she begins her veri- 
table life; she will never again leave the 
hive, unless to accompany a swarm; and 
her fecundity will cease only at the ap- 
proach of death. 
[ 88 ] 
Prodigious nuptials these, the most 
fairylike that can be conceived, azure and 
tragic, raised high above life by the im- 
petus of desire; imperishable and terrible, 
unique and bewildering, solitary and infi- 
nite. An admirable ecstasy, wherein 
death supervening in all that our sphere 
has of most limpid and loveliest, in vir- 
ginal, limitless space, stamps the instant 
of happiness in the sublime transparence 
of the great sky; purifying in that im- 
maculate light the something of wretched- 
ness that always hovers around love, 
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