es had already solved the problem for
themselves. They had in various hives conceived and carried out divers
systems of defence and fortification. Here they had constructed a waxen
wall, with narrow windows, through which the huge enemy could not pass;
and there, by a more ingenious invention, without stirring anything,
they had placed at their gates intersecting arcades or little
partitions, one behind another, but alternating, so that opposite the
empty spaces between those of the first row stood the partitions of the
second row. Thus were contrived numerous openings for the impatient
crowd of bees, who could go out and come in as usual, and without any
other obstacle than the slight one of going a little zigzag; but limits,
absolute obstructions, for the great, clumsy enemy, who could not enter
with his unfolded wings, nor even insinuate himself without bruises
between the narrow corridors.

"This was the _coup d'etat_ of the lower orders, the revolution of
insects, executed by the bees, not only against those that robbed them,
but against those that denied their intelligence. The theorists who
refuse that to them, the Malebranches and the Buffons, must consider
themselves conquered. We go back to the reserve of the great students
of Nature, the Swammerdams, the Reaumurs, who, far from contesting the
genius of insects, give us numberless facts to prove that it is
flexible, that it can increase with dangers and with obstacles, that it
can quit routine, and in certain circumstances make unexpected
progress."

Intelligence among the inferior animals seems always more or less an
affair of acute senses; the bee certainly ought to manifest much of it,
for his senses are extraordinary. Not to speak of that singular sixth
sense of the antennae, by whose power alone he fashions his cell and
seems to make and receive communication, nor of his wonderful eyesight,
to which a double kind of eye contributes, one portion of it being for
distance and another for vertical objects or for closer work,--although
there are naturalists who consider these stemmata as a possible organ of
hearing,--he has a sense of smell which must surpass that of any other
creature on the wing: it is perhaps to this lively faculty that he owes
his marvellous cleanliness. Feburier states that at one time the bees,
attracted by the lemon-trees and flowers of Cuba, emigrated thither in a
body from the mainland of Florida, a distance of twenty-five
leagues,-