of the infinity of its ignorance, it dwindles into the mere routine of the baser side of our intellect.  But the bees have themselves answered the objection Messrs. Kirby and Spence advanced.  Scarcely had it been formulated when another naturalist, Andrew Knight, having covered the bark of some diseased trees with a kind of cement made of turpentine and wax, discovered that his bees were entirely renouncing the collection of propolis, and exclusively using this unknown matter, which they had quickly tested and adopted, and found in abundant quantities, ready prepared, in the vicinity of their dwelling.

And indeed, one-half of the science and practice of apiculture consists in giving free rein to the spirit of initiative possessed by the bees, and in providing their enterprising intellect with opportunities for veritable discoveries and veritable inventions.  Thus, for instance, to aid in the rearing of the larvae and nymphs, the bee-keeper will scatter a certain quantity of flour close to the hive when the pollen is scarce of which these consume an enormous quantity.  In a state of nature, in the heart of their native forests in the Asiatic valleys, where they existed probably long before the tertiary epoch, the bees can evidently never have met with a substance of this kind.  And yet, if care be taken to “bait” some of them with it, by placing them on the flour, they will touch it and test it, they will perceive that its properties more or less resemble those possessed by the dust of the anthers; they will spread the news . among their sisters, and we shall soon find every forager hastening to this unexpected, incomprehensible food, which, in their hereditary memory, must be inseparable from the calyx of flowers where their flight, for so many centuries past, has been sumptuously and voluptuously welcomed.

[98]

It is a little more than a hundred years ago that Huber’s researches gave the first serious impetus to our study of the bees, and revealed the elementary important truths that allowed us to observe them with fruitful result.  Barely fifty years have passed since the foundation of rational, practical apiculture was rendered possible by means of the movable combs and frames devised by Dzierzon and Langstroth, and the hive ceased to be the inviolable abode wherein all came to pass in a mystery from which death alone stripped the veil.  And lastly, less than fifty years have elapsed since the improvements of the microscope, of the entomologist’s laboratory, revealed the precise secret of the principal organs of the workers, of the mother, and the males.  Need we wonder if our knowledge be as scanty as our experience?  The bees have existed many thousands of years; we have watched them for ten or twelve lustres.  And if it could even be proved that no change has occurred in the hive since we first opened it, should we have the right to conclude that nothing had changed before our first questioning glance?  Do we not know that in the evolution of species a century is but as a drop of rain that is caught in the whirl of the river, and that millenaries glide as swiftly over the life of universal matter as single years over the history of a people?