Leo Tolstoy, one of humanity's authentic literary geniuses, wrote the masterpiece on Gospel Nonviolence, The Kingdom of God is Within you, which upon reading it was the critical and final step in Gandhi's conversion to nonviolence, as well as in the conversions of untold numbers of other human beings to explicitly Gospel Nonviolence. Tolstoy was also a seasoned beekeeper. Throughout his writings he employs bees and their ways to illuminate a deeper understanding of or solution to seemingly intractable human spiritual and practical problems. For example, below he addresses one of the most insoluble and destructive of the conundrums facing humanity.

"Men in their present condition are like a swarm of bees hanging in a cluster to a branch. The position of the bees on the branch is temporary, and must inevitably be changed. They must start off and find themselves a habitation. Each of the bees knows this, and desires to change her own and the others' position, but no one of them can do it till the rest of them do it. They cannot all start off at once, because one hangs on to another and hinders her from separating from the swarm, and therefore they all continue to hang there. It would seem that the bees could never escape from their position, just as it seems that worldly men, caught in the state's conception of life, can never escape it. And there would be no escape for the bees, if each of them were not a living, separate creature, endowed with wings of its own. Similarly there would be no escape for men, if each were not a living being endowed with the faculty of entering into the Gospel's conception of life.