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The Life of the Bee into many details that will have but slender interest for the reader, whose eyes perhaps may never have followed a flight of bees; or who may have regarded them only with the passing interest with which we are all of us apt to regard the flower, the bird or the precious stone, asking of these no more than a slight superficial assurance, and forgetting that the most trivial secret of the non-human object we behold in nature connects more closely perhaps with the profound enigma of our origin and our end, than the secret of those of our passions that we study the most eagerly and the most passionately.

And I will pass over too—in my desire that this essay shall not become too didactic—the remarkable instinct that induces the bees at times to thin and demolish the extremity of their combs, when 207