ESS

The Spirit of the Hive, which Maeterlinck makes so much of, seems to
give us the key to the psychic life of all the lower orders. What one
knows, all of that kind seem to know at the same instant. It seems as if
they drew it in with the air they breathed. It is something like
community of mind, or unity of mind. Of course it is not an intellectual
process, but an emotional process; not a thought, as with us, but an
impulse.

So far as we know there is nothing like a council or advisory board in
the hive. There are no decrees or orders. The swarm is a unit. The
members act in concert without direction or rule. If anything happens to
the queen, if she is lost or killed, every bee in the hive seems to know
it at the same instant, and the whole swarm becomes greatly agitated.
The division of labor in the hive is spontaneous: the bees function and
cooeperate as do the organs in our own bodies, each playing its part
without scheme or direction.

This community of mind is seen in such an instance as that of the
migrating lemmings from the Scandinavian peninsula. Vast hordes of these
little creatures are at times seized with an impulse to migrate or to
commit suicide, for it amounts to that. They leave their habitat in
Norway and, without being deflected by any obstacle, march straight
toward the sea, swimming lakes and rivers that lie in their way. When
the coast is reached, they enter the water and continue on their course.
Ship captains report sailing for hours through waters literally alive
with them. This suicidal act of the lemmings strikes one as a kind of
insanity. It is one of the most puzzling phenomena I know of in animal
life. But the migration of all animals on a large scale shows the same
unity of purpose. The whole tribe shares in a single impulse. The annual
migration of the caribou in the North is an illustration. In the
flocking birds this unity of mind is especially noticeable. The vast
armies of passenger pigeons which we of an older generation saw in our
youth moved like human armies under orders. They formed a unit. They
came in countless hordes like an army of invasion, and they departed in
the same way. Their orders were written upon the air; their leaders were
as intangible as the shadows of their wings. The same is true of all our
flocking birds; a flock of snow buntings, or of starlings, or of
blackbirds, will act as one body, performing their evolutions in the air
with astonishing precision.