To bolster up his case, Maeterlinck urges that "the capacity 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,
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 with the news that "the lime-trees are blooming to-day on the banks of the canal"; "the grass by the roadside is gay with white clover"; "the sage and the lotus are about to open"; "the mignonette and the lilies are overflowing with pollen." Whereupon the bees must organize quickly and arrange to divide the work. They probably call a council of the wise ones and after due discussion and formalities proceed to send out their working expeditions. "Five thousand of the sturdiest will sally forth to the lime-trees, while three thousand juniors go and refresh the white clover." "They make daily calculations as to the means of obtaining the greatest possible wealth of saccharine liquid."