"The destinies of humanity are contained in epitome in the existence of the humblest little animals," is a thought of Pascal which might well have suggested Maeterlinck's La Vie des Abeilles (The Life of the Bee). It appeared in 1901. Maeterlinck had kept bees for years; and continued to do so when he set up his abode at a villa in Gruchet-Saint-Siméon in Normandy.
The Life of the Bee is not a scientific treatise, though it is scientifically correct; it does not claim to bring new material; it is a simple account of the bees' short year from April to the last days of September, told by one who loves and knows them to those who, he assumes, have no intimate knowledge. His intention is to observe bees and see if his observations can throw light on the destinies of humanity.
To begin with, bees are incessantly working, each at a different trade. Those that seem most idle, as you watch them in an observation hive, have the most mysterious and fatiguing task of all, to secrete and form the wax; just as there are some men (the thinkers) who appear useless, but who alone make it possible for a certain number of men to be useful.[10]
The bee is a creature of the crowd: isolate her and she will die of loneliness. From the city she derives an aliment that is as necessary to her as honey. (We remember that in Wisdom and Destiny saints were called egotists because they fled from their fellow-men.) In the hive the individual is nothing. The bees are socialists, we shall find; they are as united as the good thoughts that dwell in the same soul; they have a collectivist policy. This was not always so; and even to-day there are savage bees who live in lonely wretchedness. The hive of to-day is perfect, though pitiless; it merges the individual in the republic, and the republic itself is regularly sacrificed to the abstract, immortal city of the future. The will of Nature clearly tends to the improvement of the race, but she shows at the same time that she cannot obtain this improvement except by sacrificing the liberty of the individual to the general interest. First, the individual must renounce his vices, which are acts of independence. Whereas the workers among the humble-bees, a lower order, do not dream of renouncing love, our domestic bee lives in perpetual chastity.
It is the "spirit of the hive" that rules the bees and all they do. It decrees that when the hour comes they shall "swarm." This desertion of the hive was previously thought to be an attack of fatal folly (we are in the habit of ascribing things we do not understand to "fatality"); but science has discovered (what may not science discover?) that it is a deliberate sacrifice of the present generation to the future generation. The god of the bees is the future. To this future everything is subordinated, with astonishing foresight, co-operation, and inflexibility. It is clear that the bees have will-power. You may see where this will-power, which is the "spirit of the hive," resides, if you place the careworn head of a virgin worker under the microscope: within this little head are the circumvolutions of the vastest and the most ingenious brain of the hive, the most beautiful, the most complicated brain which is in nature after that of man. Here again, as everywhere else in the world, where the brain is there is authority, the real strength, wisdom, and victory. Here again it is an almost invisible atom of that mysterious substance that organises and subjugates matter, and is able to create for itself a little triumphant and durable place amid, the stupendous and inert powers of nothingness and death.
The description of the swarming is very beautiful. When the beekeeper is collecting the bees from the bough they have settled on, he need not fear them. They are inoffensive because they are happy, and they are happy without knowing why: they are fulfilling the law. All creatures, great and small, have such a moment of blind happiness when Nature wishes to accomplish her ends. The bees are Nature's dupes; so are we.
Some observers, Lord Avebury for instance, do not estimate the intelligence of the bee as highly as Maeterlinck does; but the experiments on which they base their conclusions do not seem to Maeterlinck to be more decisive than the spectacle of the ravages of alcohol, or of a battlefield, would be to a superhuman observer trying to fix the limits of human intelligence. And then, think of the situation of the bee in the world: by the side of an extraordinary being who is always upsetting the laws of its nature. How should we behave if some Higher Being should foil our wisdom? And how do we know there is no such Higher Being, or more than one, who might be to us as indistinguishable as man, the great ape, and the bear are to the bee? It is certain that there are within us and around us influences and powers as dissimilar and as indistinguishable.
It is as interesting and as important to us to discover signs of intellect outside ourselves as it was to Robinson Crusoe to find the imprint of a human foot other than his own on the sandy beach of his island. When we study the intelligence of bees we study what is most precious in our own substance, an atom of that extraordinary matter which has the property of transfiguring blind necessity, of organising and multiplying life and making it more beautiful, of checking the obstinate force of death and the great irresponsible wave that rolls round in earth's diurnal course all eternally unconscious things.
This intelligence is the devouring force of the future. Do not say that mankind is deteriorating. Alcohol and syphilis, for instance, are accidents that the race will overcome; perhaps they are tests by which some of our organs, the nervous organs for instance, will profit, for life constantly profits by the ills it surmounts. A trifle may be discovered to-morrow which will make them innocuous. Confidence in life is the first of our duties. We have everything to hope from evolution. It will lessen exertion, insecurity, and wretchedness; it will increase comfort. To this end it will not hesitate to sacrifice the individual. And let us note that progress recorded by nature is never lost. Life is a constant progression, whither, we do not know.
The whole book is a powerful epic of brain force. It is easy, Maeterlinck concludes his message, to discover the preordained duty of any being. You can read it in the organ which distinguishes it, and to which all its other organs are subordinated. Just as it is written on the tongue, in the mouth, and in the stomach of the bee that its duty is to produce honey, so it is written in our eyes, our ears, our marrow, in every lobe of our head, in the whole nervous system of our body, that we have been created to transform what we absorb from the things of the earth into that strange fluid we call brain power. Everything has been sacrificed to that. Our muscles, our health, the agility of our limbs, bear the growing pain of its preponderance.