Bees

Bees are central to Almustafa’s account of pleasure as a reciprocal exchange: the bee gathers honey from the flower, while the flower takes pleasure in yielding it. Neither is merely an instrument for the other. The bee receives a fountain of life, and the bee in turn becomes a messenger of love to the flower. Together, they show the people of Orphalese a form of pleasure in which giving and receiving are both necessary and joyful.

Appearance and Role in the Teaching

Bees enter the teaching when Almustafa addresses a question about how to distinguish good pleasure from pleasure that is not good. He directs his listeners away from an abstract rule and toward fields and gardens, making the bee and flower a concrete example through which pleasure can be understood. The bee is shown gathering honey; the flower is not portrayed as a passive source alone, but as a participant that takes pleasure in yielding its honey.

The passage gives the bee two connected functions. It gathers what sustains it, and it carries love to the flower. The flower, correspondingly, both nourishes the bee and finds pleasure in giving. This mutuality is the point of the image: neither side’s part can be reduced to the other’s benefit. Almustafa does not offer a natural-history account of Bees; he selects their relation with flowers to make an ethical and emotional principle legible.

The Bee and the Flower

The exchange begins with a difference in action: the bee gathers, while the flower yields. But the teaching does not frame that difference as conflict or loss. Gathering is the bee’s pleasure; yielding honey is also the flower’s pleasure. The same exchange can therefore be seen from both sides without one participant’s experience canceling the other’s. What passes between them is at once sustenance for the bee and a gift freely given by the flower.

Almustafa sharpens the reciprocity by assigning each participant a distinct value in the other’s life. To the bee, the flower is a fountain of life; to the flower, the bee is a messenger of love. The flower’s importance is thus more than its usefulness as a source of honey, and the bee’s role is more than extraction. The paired images make dependence reciprocal: the bee needs the flower’s gift, while the flower’s relation to the bee is also described in terms of pleasure and love. Their connection joins need to delight rather than treating need as a failure of freedom.

Pleasure as Mutual Giving

The example answers the question about good pleasure by emphasizing that pleasure is shared. Almustafa says the giving and receiving of pleasure are both a need and an ecstasy for bee and flower. Need gives the exchange its importance; ecstasy describes its felt abundance. Pleasure is not presented as something one party secures at the other’s expense, but as an experience made possible through participation on both sides.

This model resonates with Almustafa’s separate teaching on giving, where possessions alone count as a lesser gift than giving of oneself. He also distinguishes giving when asked from giving unasked through understanding, and cautions receivers against turning gratitude into a weight borne by giver and recipient alike. These teachings do not identify the bee’s gathering with human generosity, but they share an emphasis on exchange that is more than transfer or possession. In the bee-and-flower image, each side contributes to a relation whose value cannot be assigned to only one participant.

Wider Significance

The instruction to the people of Orphalese is to be like flowers and Bees in their pleasures. That comparison turns the natural image into a practical standard without prescribing a rigid rule: pleasure is good when giving and receiving belong to the same living relation. The bee’s pleasure does not require the flower’s pleasure to disappear; the flower’s yielding is not described as mere sacrifice. Almustafa’s example instead holds appetite, generosity, need, and delight together.

The image also belongs to a wider pattern in the teachings that treats exchange as potentially abundant when shaped by care and fairness. In another address, Almustafa says that abundance and satisfaction are found in exchanging the gifts of the earth, while warning that exchange without love and kindly justice can bring harm. The bee and flower give that concern a small, vivid form: exchange is not automatically good simply because something passes between two parties; its character depends on the relation enacted through it. Their paired pleasures make the lesson especially clear. Bees are not solitary emblems of industry or appetite here, but participants in a mutual giving whose outcome is nourishment, love, and shared ecstasy.