Bees

nor do many swarms of bees, feeding in one and the same meadow, neglect their work and quarrel over the dew on the flowers.

And so exceedingly, they say, do they love one another and each its own swarm, that whenever they are caught outside by a storm, a great wind having arisen, each one, taking up a stone for its feet as a kind of ballast, flies thus, that they may not be carried off course by the wind nor miss their hive.

is it not disgraceful, if bees are in concord, and no one has ever seen a swarm in faction and fighting with itself — but they work together and live together, both providing themselves with food and using it.

I answered, and does not suffer the bees to be idle;

And when the young bees have been duly reared and are fit for work, she sends them forth to found a colony, with a leader to guide the young adventurers.

Why, my dear, cried I, delighted with her answer, what makes the bees so devoted to their leader in the hive, that when she forsakes it, they all follow her, and not one thinks of staying behind?

For they neither approach all flowers alike, nor do they try to carry off whole those on which they alight, but, taking only so much of them as is fit for their work, they let the rest go.

For as with flowers, the rest of men have enjoyment only of their fragrance or their colour, but to the bees it falls to gather honey from them as well, so here too those who pursue in such writings not the merely sweet and pleasant alone may lay up from them some benefit for the soul.

And again, as smoke drives away bees, so we have learned that the grace of the divine Spirit drives away wicked thoughts.

Thus on and on along the zephyrs bees

Are led by odour of honey, vultures too

Of the bees it is not sufficiently agreed whether they draw from the flowers a juice which is at once honey, or whether they change what they have gathered into this flavour by a certain blending and property of their own breath.

We ought, as men say, to imitate the bees, which wander about and cull the flowers suitable for making honey, then arrange and distribute among the combs whatever they have brought in, and, as our Virgil says, "pack the liquid honey and stretch the cells with sweet nectar.

For nature has devised a king, as one may learn both from the other animals and from the bees;

bees are most irascible and, for the capacity of their bodies, most given to fighting, and leave their stings in the wound, but the king himself is without a sting;

Division of labour does not always result in differentiation of structure.