CHAPTER VIII. 
THE BEES AS ARCHITECTS : THE CITY. 
If the wasp’s nest resemble Sparta, the bee-hive is the 
veritable Athens of the Insect World. There, all is art. 
The people—the artist-elite of the people—incessantly 
create two things; on the one hand, the City, the 
country,—on the other, the Universal Mother, whose 
task it is not only to perpetuate the race, but to become 
its idol, its fetish , the living god of the community. 
The bees share with the wasps, the ants, and all 
the sociable insects, the disinterested life of aunts and 
sisters,—laborious virgins, who devote themselves en¬ 
tirely to an adoptive maternity. 
But from these analogous peoples the bee differs in 
the necessity it is under of creating a national idol, the 
love of which impels it to work. 
All this has been long misunderstood. It was at first supposed that 
this State was a monarchy, that it possessed a king. Not at all; the king 
