y for folly
so great in itself argues intelligence," which amounts to saying that
the more fool you are, the more you know.

Buffon did not share Maeterlinck's high opinion of the intelligence of
the bee; he thought the dog, the monkey, and the majority of other
animals possess far more; an opinion which I share. Indeed, of free
intelligence the bee possesses very little. The slave of an
overmastering instinct, as our new nature poet, McCarthy, says,

She makes of labor an eternal lust.

Bees do wonderful things, but do them blindly. They work as well (or
better) in the darkness as in the light. The Spirit of the Hive knows
and directs all. The unit is the swarm, and not the individual bee.

The bee does not know fear; she does not know love. She will defend the
swarm with her life, but her fellows she heeds not.

It is very doubtful if the individual bees of the same hive recognize
one another at all outside the hive. Every beehunter knows how the bees
from the same tree will clip and strike at one another around his box,
when they are first attracted to it. After they are seriously engaged in
carrying away his honey, they pay no attention to one another or to bees
from other swarms. That bees tell one another of the store of honey they
have found is absurd. The unity of the swarm attends to that.

Maeterlinck tells of a little Italian bee that he once experimented upon
during an afternoon, the results showing that this bee had told the news
of her find to eighteen bees! Its "vocabulary" stood it in good stead!

Maeterlinck's conception of the Spirit of the Hive was an inspiration,
and furnishes us with the key to all that happens in the hive. The
secret of all its economies are in the phrase. Having hit upon this
solution, he should have had the courage to stand by it. But he did not.
He is continually forgetting it and applying to his problem the
explanations we apply in our dealings with one another. He talks of the
power of the bees to give "expression to their thoughts and feelings";
of their "vocabulary," phonetic and tactile; he says that the
"extraordinary also has a name and place in their language"; that they
are able to "communicate to each other news of an event occurring
outside the hive"; all of which renders his Spirit of the Hive
superfluous. He quotes from a French apiarist who says that the explorer
of the dawn,--the early bee,--like the early bird that catches the worm,
returns to the hive w