BEES AND WASPS GENERAL INTELLIGENCE. 181 



their absence. Fabre carried the dead or paralysed 

 grasshopper to a considerable distance from the hole. 

 On coming out the insect searched about until it found 

 its prey. It then again carried it to the mouth of its 

 burrow, and again laid it down while it once more went 

 in to see that all was right at home. Again Fabre 

 removed the grasshopper, and so on for forty times in 

 succession the sphex never omitting to go through its 

 fixed routine of examining the interior of its burrow 

 every time that it brought the prey to its mouth. 



Mr. Mivart, in his ' Lessons from Nature,' points to the 

 instinct of this animal in the stinging of the ganglion of 

 its prey as one that cannot be explained on Mr. Darwin's 

 theory concerning the origin of instincts. In my next 

 work, which will have to deal with this theory, I shall 

 consider Mr. Mivart's difficulty, and also the difficulty first 

 pointed out by Mr. Darwin himself as to why neuter 

 insects, separated as they appear to be from the possi- 

 bility of communicating by heredity any instinctive 

 acquirements of the individual to the species, should 

 present any instincts at all. 



General Intelligence. 



Beginning with Sir John Lubbock's observations on 

 this head, I shall first quote his statements with regard to 

 way-finding : - 



I have found, he says, that some bees are much more intel- 

 ligent in this respect than others. A bee which I had fed 

 several times, and which had flown about in the room, found its 

 way out of the glass in a quarter of an hour, and when put in a 

 second time came out at once. Another bee, when I closed the 

 postern door, used to come round to the honey through an 

 open window. 



Bees seem to me much less clever in finding things than I 

 nad expected. One day (April 14, 1872), when a number of 

 them were very busy on some barberries, I put a saucer with 

 some honey between two bunches of flowers ; these were re- 

 peatedly visited, and were so close that there was hardly room 

 for the saucer betweeen them, yet from 9.30 to 3.30 not a 

 single bee took any notice of the honey. At 3.30 I put some 



