From the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the Palermo Academicians of Good Taste adopted the enterprise of the bee, perhaps not fully aware of the conceptual depth of this tradition, but certainly induced to reconcile the utility of science with the sweetness of letters and historical recovery, the symbolism in question evolved its meaning, anticipating the general change in the values ​​of society: the future was no longer oriented towards freedom or towards a "morality of duties", but towards an industrial society populated by "hard-working bees", voluntary slaves at the service of a State entirely intent on increasing its own material well-being. The bees were then captured by the Moderns, by a modern par excellence, Napoleon, the Emperor of the French, who placed them on his purple cloak. This robe, a rich purple, a symbol of his royalty and imperial power, was adorned with dozens of tiny bees embroidered in gold thread, a nod to the bees found in 1653 in the tomb of Childeric, founder of the Merovingian dynasty, buried in 481 AD. These bees, symbols of industriousness and order, were thus reintroduced into the context of a new empire, an emblem of Napoleonic France, where obedience and work in the service of the state were celebrated as central values. The purple robe with the bees not only recalled history, but also embodied Napoleon's vision of a strong and productive empire, uniting the dynastic past with the imperial present. In Napoleon's imagination, bees became the emblem of the obedience owed to the new Augustus, and ended up representing, at the conclusion of a real "battle of the bees", cynical symbols of bourgeois and mercantile society, model agents of political and liberal economy.