These conjectures may perhaps be regarded as exceedingly venturesome, and possibly also as unduly human. It may be urged that the bees, in all probability, have no idea of the kind; that their care for the future, love of the race, and many other feelings we choose to ascribe to them, are truly no more than forms assumed by the necessities of life, the fear of suffering or death, and the attraction of pleasure. Let it be so; look on it all as a figure of speech; it is a matter to which I attach no importance. The one thing certain here, as it is the one thing certain in all other cases, is that, under special circumstances, the bees will treat their queen in a special manner. The rest is all mystery, around which we only can weave more or less ingenious and pleasant conjecture. And yet, were we speaking of man in the manner wherein it were wise perhaps to speak of the bee, is there very much more we could say? He too yields only to necessity, the attraction of pleasure, and the fear of suffering; and what we call our intellect has the same origin and mission as what in animals we choose to term instinct. We do certain things, whose results we conceive to be known to us; other things happen, and we flatter ourselves that we are better equipped than animals can be to divine their cause; but, apart from the fact that this supposition rests on no very solid foundation, events of this nature are rare and infinitesimal, compared with the vast mass of others that elude comprehension; and all, the pettiest and the most sublime, the best known and the most inexplicable, the nearest and the most distant, come to pass in a night so profound that our blindness may well be almost as great as that we suppose in the bee.
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“All must agree,” remarks Buffon, who has a somewhat amusing prejudice against the bee,—” all must agree that these flies, individually considered, possess far less genius than the dog, the monkey, or the majority of animals; that they display far less docility, attachment, or sentiment; that they have, in a word, less qualities that relate to our own; and from that we may conclude that their apparent intelligence derives only from their assembled multitude; nor does this union even argue intelligence, for it is governed by no moral considerations, it being without their consent that they find themselves gathered together. This society, therefore, is no more than a physical assemblage ordained by nature, and independent either of knowledge, or reason, or aim. The mother-bee produces ten thousand individuals at a time, and in the same place; these ten thousand individuals, were they a thousand times stupider than I suppose them to be, would be compelled, for the mere purpose of existence, to contrive some form of arrangement; and, assuming that they had begun by injuring each other, they would, as each one possesses the same strength as its fellow, soon have ended by doing each other the least possible harm, or, in other words, by rendering