Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/533/en

In general we encounter the bee (*Apis mellifera*) as an individual in its visit to the blossom, where it sucks the nectar, pollinates the flowers, and collects pollen in its baskets on the hind legs. This taking and giving activity fulfils itself in the periphery of its living space. Polar to this, the single being finds its centre in the beehive, where it unites with thousands of others in the most vigorous activity and becomes a member of an all-encompassing inner life — the life of the «colony», a self-organizing organism whose activities articulate themselves with organ-like strictness. What otherwise in the functions of an organism remains hidden from view, here a division-of-labour activity opens itself to the gaze: the egg-laying queen, the mass of worker bees — who in their turn attend to comb-building, brood care, feeding of the queen, self-cleaning, foraging, and provisioning — and the drones, who fertilize the queen in her sun-directed nuptial flight. Each of these spatially and temporally finely attuned activities awakens the impression of a selfless going-forth in sacrifice. In the warmth that the bees seek to maintain in the hive through their own activity at approximately 35°C, they create the incarnation-medium for the group soul: the beekeeper speaks of «the colony», which in a nature-given way allows a social organism to arise that anticipates a selfless behaviour that human beings will first have to acquire in their social life together out of the force of the I.