By Water & Blood

Beetles, bees, and the holy bath

3. One might well marvel to find even among the naturalists things full of usefulness, if one is likened to the intelligence of the bee, which settles on every kind of plant but gathers for itself what is useful. For the intelligent person is nowhere harmed,

but rather gains from every quarter, while the unintelligent will be harmed—as also the holy prophet says: “Who is intelligent and will understand these things? And to whom is the word of the Lord, and he will know them—that the ways of the Lord are straight, but the ungodly will be weak in them?”

For we have found also among those called naturalists—or rather we ourselves see—that the race of beetles which some call bylaroi has the habit of rolling about in foul smell and dung; and this is their food and work, while to others that same muddy food of theirs is only burden and stench.

And to bees this dung and foul smell is death, but to bylaroi it is work and food and business. To bees, on the contrary, fragrance and flowers and ointments serve for refreshment, acquisition, and food, for work and business; but to the beetles already mentioned—or bylaroi—such things are the opposite.

For anyone who wishes to put them to the test, as the naturalists say, takes some perfume (I mean balsam juice or nard) and offers it to the beetles and brings death upon them; for they die at once, unable to bear the fragrance.

So also these people, craving lust and fornication and wickedness, set their hope on evil things; but when they draw near the holy bath and its fragrance they die, blaspheming God and rejecting his lordship.