Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jan 25, 2026

Monitoring Colony-level Effects of Sublethal Pesticide Exposure on Honey Bees
Published on: November 15, 2017
Why does Aristotle think bees are divine? Proportion, triplicity and order in the natural world
1Department of Classics and Department of Philosophy, Queen's University, Kingston, ON, Canada.
Abstract:
Concluding his discussion of bee reproduction in Book 3 of Generation of Animals, Aristotle makes a famous methodological pronouncement about the relationship between sense perception and theory in natural history. In the very next sentence, he casually remarks that the unique method of reproduction that he finds in bees should not be surprising, since bees have something 'divine' about them. Although the methodological pronouncement gets a fair bit of scholarly attention, and although Aristotle's theological commitments in cosmology and metaphysics are well known, scholars have almost universally passed over the comment about bees and divinity in silence. This paper aims to show why that comment is no mere throwaway, and offers an exploration and elaboration of the ways in which divinity operates even at fairly mundane levels in his natural philosophy, as an important Aristotelian explanation for order, proportion and rationality, even in the lowest of animals.
More Related Videos
Related Concept Videos
Sample Proportion and Population Proportion
What is Natural Selection?
Testing a Claim about Population Proportion
There are two methods of testing a claim about a population proportion: (1) Using the sample proportion from the data where a binomial distribution is approximated to the normal distribution and (2) Using the binomial probabilities calculated from the data.
The first method uses normal distribution as an approximation to the binomial distribution. The requirements are as follows: sample size is large...
The Wave Nature of Light
Nature and Nurture
Chirality in Nature

