This year marks 100 years since Rudolph Steiner's lectures on bees, conducted in Nov. & Dec., 1923. No one has ever presented on the topic quite the way he did

> You see, with bees it is always the case that only very few chosen females, the queen bees, take care of all the propaga¬ tion of the species. With the rest, the sexual life is more or less repressed, but in this sexual life there is another element— love life—which is, above all, a matter concerning the soul. Only when the soul element works on certain organs of the body do these organs become a manifestation, an expression of love life. Since this love life is held back in all the bees except a single queen, the sexual life of the beehive is trans¬ formed into all this activity that the bees develop among themselves. That is why those much older and wiser people of a time long ago, "knew" about this in a very different way than the way we know things today; they knew that the wonderful activity of the beehive pointed back to the condition of the bees' love life, the love life that these people associated in their minds with the planet Venus.

> About this we can say the following. If you try to describe, on the one hand, wasps and ants in this regard, then they are considered animals that remove themselves more from the influence of the planet Venus. Bees, on the other hand, are completely open to this influence and develop this love life throughout the entire bee colony. This is a very wise form of life, for you can imagine how wise it would have to be. There is unconscious wisdom in it, a wisdom that they develop in their observable activities. That which we experience within ourselves only at a time when our hearts develop love is actually the very same thing that is present as a substance in the entire beehive. The whole beehive is per¬ meated with life based on love. In many ways the bees renounce love, and thereby this love develops within the entire beehive. You'll begin to understand the life of bees once you're clear about the fact that the bee lives as if it were in an atmosphere pervaded thoroughly by love.

PLB

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