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But what have we to do, some will ask, with the intelligence of the bees?  What concern is it of ours whether this be a little less or a little more?  Why weigh, with such infinite care, a minute fragment of almost invisible matter, as though it were a fluid whereon depended the destiny of man?  I hold, and exaggerate nothing, that our interest herein is of the most considerable.  The discovery of a sign of true intellect outside ourselves procures us something of the emotion Robinson Crusoe felt when he saw the imprint of a human foot on the sandy beach of his island.  We seem less solitary than we had believed.  And indeed, in our endeavour to understand the intellect of the bees, we are studying in them that which is most precious in our own substance:  an atom of the extraordinary matter which possesses, wherever it attach itself, the magnificent power of transfiguring blind necessity, of organising, embellishing, and multiplying life; and, most striking of all, of holding in suspense the obstinate force of death, and the mighty, irresponsible wave that wraps almost all that exists in an eternal unconsciousness.

Were we sole possessors of the particle of matter that, when maintained in a special condition of flower or incandescence, we term the intellect, we should to some extent be entitled to look on ourselves as privileged beings, and to imagine that in us nature achieved some kind of aim; but here we discover, in the hymenoptera, an entire category of beings in whom a more or less identical aim is achieved.  And this fact, though it decide nothing perhaps, still holds an honourable place in the mass of tiny facts that help to throw light on our position in this world.  It affords even, if considered from a certain point of view, a fresh proof of the most enigmatic part of our being; for the superpositions of destinies that we find in the hive are surveyed by us from an eminence loftier than any we can attain for the contemplation of the destinies of man.  There we see before us, in miniature, the large and simple lines that in our own disproportionate sphere we never have the occasion to disentangle and follow to the end.  Spirit and matter are there, the race and the individual, evolution and permanence, life and death, the past and the future; all gathered together in a retreat that our hand can lift and one look of our eye embrace.  And may we not reasonably ask ourselves whether the mere size of a body, and the room that it fills in time and space, can modify to the extent we imagine the secret idea of nature; the idea that we try to discover in the little history of the hive, which in a few days already is ancient, no less than in the great history of man, of whom three generations overlap a long century?

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