The interest offered by bees is very great, but does not pass that offered by the observation of most hymenoptera, social or solitary, or of certain neuroptera, such as termites; or even by beavers, and many birds. But bees have been through many ages our sugar-producers, and they alone; hence man's tenderness for insects more valuable than all others to him. Their intelligence is well developed, but soon shows its limitations. People pretend that bees know their master, a manifest error. The relations of bees and man are purely human. It is evident that they are as ignorant of man as are all the other insects, and all other invertebrata. They allow themselves to be exploited, in the sense of their instinct, to the limit of famine and muscular exhaustion. Virgil's phrase is excessively true, in all the senses one wishes to take: _Sic vos non vobis mellificatis apes_. (Bees making honey not for yourselves.) These clever, witty creatures are fooled by the gross fakes of our industrial cunning. When they have stacked their winter's provisions, honey, into their wax combs, one removes the honeycombs, and replaces them by sockets of varnished paper: and the solemn bees, set themselves to forgetting their long labours; before these virgin combs, they have but one idea: to fill them. They restart work with a bustle which would excite veritable pity in any man but a bee-keeper. These commercials have invented a hive with moveable combs. The bees will never know. Bees are stupid. But we who see the limits of intelligence in bees, should consider the limits of our own. There are limits; it is possible to conceive brains who observing us, would say: men are stupid. All intelligence is limited; it is just this shock against the limit, against the wall, which by the pain it causes, engenders consciousness. We are not to laugh too much at the bees who gaily furnish the mobile combs of their improved hives. We are perhaps the slaves of a master who exploits us, and who will remain forever unknown. The polygamy, or if one wish, the polyandry of bees, pretext for this digression, is then purely virtual; it is in the state of possibility, but it will never be realized, since the fecundity of the queen is assured by a single act. The excessive multiplicity of males corresponds doubtless to an ancient order in which the females were more numerous. In any case only two or three males out of about a thousand, are used, or let us say ten, if you wish to suppose very frequent swarming, this demonstrates that one must not prejudge the habits of an animal specie by the overabundance of one sex or another, and that, in a general fashion, one must place natural logic above our human logic, derived from mathematical logic. Facts in nature are connected by a thousand knots of which no one is solvable by human logic. When one of these tangles is unravelled before our eyes we marvel at the simplicity of its mechanism, we think we understand,