The Life of the Bee quotes

Whenever there be doubt, disagreement, hypothesis, when I arrive at the unknown, I shall declare it loyally; you will find that we often shall halt before the unknown. Beyond the appreciable facts of their life we know but little of the bees.

And the closer our acquaintance becomes, the nearer is our ignorance brought to us of the depths of their real existence; but such ignorance is better than the other kind, which is unconscious, and satisfied.

Does an analogous work on the bee exist? I believe I have read almost all that has been written on bees;

… for an instant into flower-filled space, as the swimmer will dive into the sea that is filled with pearls, but under pain of death it behoves her at regular intervals to return and breathe the crowd as the swimmer must return and breathe the air.

Isolate her, and however abundant the food or favourable the temperature, she will expire in a few days not of hunger or cold, but of loneliness.

From the crowd, from the city, she derives an invisible aliment that is as necessary to her as honey. This craving will help to explain the spirit of the laws of the hive.

… kingdom and flung themselves upon the uncertainties of life, they were yielding to a kind of irresistible folly, a mechanical impulse, a law of the species, a decree of nature, or to the force that for all creatures lies hidden in the revolution of time.

It is our habit, in the case of the bees no less than our own, to regard as fatality all that we do not as yet understand.

But now that the hive has surrendered two or three of its material secrets, we have discovered that this exodus is neither instinctive nor inevitable.

… activity that will soon spring into life, she will tranquilly resume her maternal labours, which consist in the laying of two or three thousand eggs a day, as she passes, in a methodical spiral, from cell to cell, omitting none, and never pausing to rest.

Where is the fatality here, save in the love of the race of to-day for the race of to-morrow?

This fatality exists in the human species also, but its extent and power seem infinitely less. Among men it never gives rise to sacrifices as great, as unanimous, or as complete. What far-seeing fatality, taking the place of this one, do we ourselves obey?

Nor is this god, though it be perhaps the only one to which man has as yet never offered serious worship, by any means the least reasonable or the least legitimate that we can conceive.

The god of the bees is the future.

When we, in our study of human history, endeavour to gauge the moral force or greatness of a people or race, we have but one standard of measurement—the dignity and permanence of their ideal, and the abnegation wherewith they pursue it.

She will never unsheath her royal weapon—curved, in scimeter fashion, instead of being straight, like that of the ordinary bee—save only in the case of her doing battle with an equal: in other words, with a sister queen.

No bee, it would seem, dare take on herself the horror of direct and bloody regicide.

Whenever, therefore, the good order and prosperity of the republic appear to demand that a queen shall die, they endeavour to give to her death some semblance of natural decease, and by infinite subdivision of the crime, to render it almost anonymous.

… event occurring outside the hive, I should, I imagine, as a set-off against the slight disappointment this discovery would have entailed, have derived some degree of satisfaction in recognising once more that man, after all, is the only truly intelligent being who inhabits our globe.

And there comes too a period of life when we have more joy in saying the thing that is true than in saying the thing that merely is wonderful.

Here as in every case the principle holds that, should the naked truth appear at the moment less interesting, less great and noble than the imaginary embellishment it lies in our power to bestow, the fault must rest with ourselves who still are unable to …

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:

But these explanations are evidently insufficient; the first are mere hypotheses that cannot be verified, the others do no more than transplant the mystery.

And useful as it may be to transplant mystery as often as we possibly can, it were not wise to imagine that a mystery has ceased to be because we have shifted its home.

Now let us leave these dreary building grounds, this geometrical desert of cells. The combs have been started, and are becoming habitable. Though it be here the infinitely little that, without apparent hope, adds itself to the infinitely little;

and, urged on by this endeavour, we must not turn our eyes away, but steadily, fixedly, watch these sorrows and study them, with a courage and interest as keen as though they were joys.

It is right that before we judge nature, before we complain, we should at least ask every question that we can possibly ask.

We have seen that the workers, when free for the moment from the threatening fecundity of the queen, hasten to erect cells for provisions, whose construction is more economical and capacity greater.

and only after some hesitation and groping will they discover the door which stands not now where it once had stood.

It is as though space had preciously preserved, the whole winter through, the indelible track of their flight: as though the print of their tiny, laborious footsteps, still lay graven in the sky.

If the hive be displaced, therefore, many bees will lose their way;

on one occasion only, perhaps, will she make use of her wings, but then it will be to fly to her lover.

It is strange to see so many things—organs, ideas, desires, habits, an entire destiny—depending, not on a germ, which were the ordinary miracle of the plant, the animal, and man, but on a curious inert substance: a drop of honey.

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she will have no brushes, no pockets wherein to secrete the wax, no baskets to gather the pollen. The habits, the passions, that we regard as inherent in the bee, will all be lacking in her.

She will not crave for air, or the light of the sun; she will die without even once having tasted a flower.

Her existence will pass in the shadow, in the midst of a restless throng; her sole occupation the indefatigable search for cradles that she must fill. On the other hand she alone will know the disquiet of love.

She disposes of two forces that never can err; and when the phenomenon shall have trespassed beyond certain limits, she will beckon to life or to death—which arrives, re-establishes order, and unconcernedly marks out the path afresh.

She eludes us on every side; she repudiates most of our rules and breaks our standards to pieces.

On our right she sinks far beneath the level of our thoughts, on our left she towers mountain-high above them. She appears to be constantly blundering, no less in the world of her first experiments than in that of her last, of man.

… humanity welcomes today truths which perhaps would have never been born, which might not have been able to find so propitious a home, had these sacrificed illusions not first of all dwelt in, and kindled, the heart and the reason whereinto these truths should descend.

Happy the eyes that need no illusion to see that the spectacle is great!

It is illusion that teaches the others to look, to admire, and rejoice. And look as high as they will, they never can look too high. Truth rises as they draw nearer; they draw nearer when they admire.

Happy the eyes that need no illusion to see that the spectacle is great!

It is illusion that teaches the others to look, to admire, and rejoice.

And look as high as they will, they never can look too high. Truth rises as they draw nearer; they draw nearer when they admire.

Happy the eyes that need no illusion to see that the spectacle is great! It is illusion that teaches the others to look, to admire, and rejoice.

And look as high as they will, they never can look too high.

Truth rises as they draw nearer; they draw nearer when they admire.

Happy the eyes that need no illusion to see that the spectacle is great! It is illusion that teaches the others to look, to admire, and rejoice. And look as high as they will, they never can look too high.

Truth rises as they draw nearer; they draw nearer when they admire.

And whatever the heights may be whereon they rejoice, this rejoicing can never take place in the void, or above the unknown and eternal truth that rests over all things like beauty in suspense.

whereupon, with heavy steps, they go forth to meet the good, dreamless and careless slumber that shall fold them in its embrace till the time for the next repast.

But the patience of the bees is not equal to that of men.

One morning the long-expected word of command goes through the hive; and the peaceful workers turn into judges and executioners. Whence this word issues, we know not; it would seem to emanate suddenly from the cold, deliberate indignation of the workers;

This secret spring comes from the beautiful honey, itself but a ray of heat transformed, that returns now to its first condition.

It circulates in the hive like generous blood.

The bees at the full cells present it to their neighbours, who pass it on in their turn.

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?

But this truth could only be helpful were it written that we never shall know. In the meanwhile it would induce a state of stagnation within us more pernicious than the most vexatious illusions.

We are so constituted that nothing takes us further or leads us higher than the leaps made by our errors.

In point of fact we owe the little we have learned to hypotheses that were always hazardous and often absurd, and, as a general rule, less discreet than they are to-day. They were unwise, perhaps, but they kept alive the ardour for research.

But it is an illusory crowd composed of solitary units, that possess no mutual understanding, and do not act in common.

Each one is profoundly isolated in the midst of the multitude, and builds a dwelling for itself alone, heedless of its neighbour.

"They are," M. Perez remarks, "a mere congregation of individuals, brought together by similar tastes and habits, but observing scrupulously the maxim of each one for itself;

… gold, and vibrant as the sun's delectable murmur, that in the year 1730 gorged themselves with honey in the gardens of Charenton, were absolutely identical with those that to-morrow, when April returns, will be humming in the woods of Vincennes, but a few yards away.

From Reaumur's day to our own, however, is but as the twinkling of an eye; and many lives of men, placed end to end, form but a second in the history of Nature's thought.

Although the idea that our eyes have followed attains its supreme expression in our domestic bees, it must not be inferred therefrom that the hive reveals no faults.

but should a creature succeed in maintaining its little profound and complicated existence without overstepping the boundaries of instinct, without doing anything but what is ordinary, that would be very interesting too, and very extraordinary.

Restore the ordinary and the marvellous to their veritable place in the bosom of nature, and their values shift; one equals the other.

We find that their names are usurped; and that it is not they, but the things we cannot understand or explain that should arrest our attention, refresh our activity, and give a new and juster form to our thoughts and feelings and words.

… of light in the overpowering darkness, that were enough to induce us not to regret the time we have given to their little gestures and humble habits, which seem so far away and are yet so nearly akin to our grand passions and arrogant destinies.

It may be that these things are all vain; and that our own spiral of light, no less than that of the bees, has been kindled for no other purpose save that of amusing the darkness.

So, too, is it possible that some stupendous incident may suddenly surge from without, from another world, from a new phenomenon, and either inform this effort with definitive meaning, or definitively destroy it.