If the wasp's nest resemble Sparta, the bee-hive is the veritable Athens of the Insect World. There, all is art. The people—the artist-élite of the people—incessantly create two things; on the one hand, the City, the country,—on the other, the Universal Mother, whose task it is not only to perpetuate the race, but to become its idol, its fetish, the living god of the community.
The bees share with the wasps, the ants, and all the sociable insects, the disinterested life of aunts and sisters,—laborious virgins, who devote themselves entirely to an adoptive maternity.
But from these analogous peoples the bee differs in the necessity it is under of creating a national idol, the love of which impels it to work.
All this has been long misunderstood. It was at first supposed that this State was a monarchy, that it possessed a king. Not at all; the king is a female. Thereupon one is driven to say, This female is a queen. Another error. Not only does she not govern, or reign, or control, but in certain conjunctions she is governed, and sometimes even placed in private confinement. She is at once something more and something less than a queen. She is an object of legal and public adoration; I should say legal and constitutional, for this adoration is not so blind but that the idol, in some cases, as we shall see, may be treated very severely.
"Then, at bottom, the government will be democratic?" Yes; if we take into consideration the unanimous devotion of the people, the spontaneous labour of everybody. No one commands. But, nevertheless, you can clearly see that in every higher work an intelligent body of the élite, an aristocracy of artists, takes the lead. The city is not built or organized by the entire people, but by a special class, a kind of guild or corporation. While the mob of bees seeks the common nourishment abroad, certain much larger bees, the wax-makers, elaborate the wax, prepare it, shape it, and skilfully make use of it. Like the medieval freemasons, this respectable corporation of architects toils and builds on the principles of a profound geometry. Like those of the old days, they are the masters of the living stone. But our worthy bees are far more deserving of the title! The materials which they employ they have made, have elaborated by their vital action, and vivified with their internal juices.
Neither the honey nor the wax is a vegetable substance. Those little light bees which go in quest of the essence of the flowers bring it back already transformed and enriched by their virginal life. Sweet and pure, it passes from their mouth to the mouth of their elder sisters. These, the grave wax-makers, having received the aliment vivified and endowed with the charming sweetness which is, as it were, the soul of the race, elaborate it in their turn, and communicate to it their own peculiar life,—solidity. Wise and sedentary, they work up the liquid into a sedentary honey, a honey of the second quality, a kind of reflected honey. This is not all: the substance twice elaborated, and twice penetrated with animal juice, they incessantly moisten with their saliva, when using it so as to render it softer for working, but more tenacious afterwards.
Was I wrong, then, in saying that this construction is truly one of "the living stones"? There is not an atom of the materials which is not three times impregnated with life. Who shall say of yonder hive whether the flower or the bee has furnished the greater part? The latter has certainly contributed an important share. Here, the home of the people is the people's substance and visible soul; from themselves they have extracted their city, and their city is, in truth, themselves. Bee and hive, it is one and the same thing.
But let us observe them at work.