INSTINCT IN INSECTS. 155 



In the general effort that produces the honey-comb, it is important 

 to make allowance for that supreme law of necessity which Buffon 

 refers to, and which compels each insect, if it makes a mistake in its 

 measurements, to begin its work again, under penalty of seeing it de- 

 stroyed by its neighbors. The bee's cell is no more an individual 

 work than it is a work finished all at once. At the beerinniner, the 

 six-sided plan is scarcely indicated ; the original wall is clumsy, often-, 

 times too thick ; it is attempted a second time, made thinner at the 

 bottom, thickened at the top, crowded by force into its right place, 

 and worked over and over constantly to the last perfection. The geo- 

 metric regularity of the whole is the result of long tentative work. A 

 multitude of bees are laboring on it at once, each for a time at one 

 cell, then at another, and so on ; twenty insects at least busy them- 

 selves with the first chamber, which at the outset is very irregular; 

 new chambers are added, and the first remade. On all these points 

 Darwin and other English naturalists have made very curious experi- 

 ments, which deserve to be cited along with the observations of 

 Francis Huber. He observed, to learn ; they experimented, to explain. 

 By dealing with swarms or individuals properly isolated, by modify- 

 ing their conditions of labor, by deceiving their instinct, we should 

 doubtless succeed in decomposing it by a kind of physiological analy- 

 sis, at the same time that we should ascertain more clearly the toler- 

 ably large share that intelligence probably has in this industry of the 

 bee. This is an aspect of the problem that is perhaps too much neg- 

 lected by Darwin, but indicated by Mdlle. Clemence Royer in the 

 notes added by her to the French translation of the " Origin of Spe- 

 cies." We may ask, Why should not the bee itself be sensitive to that 

 harmony of lines which strikes our eye in its work? Why deny so 

 simple an impression as that which springs from regularity, to that 

 brain which is of tiny dimensions, it is true, but which is quick to 

 seize relations of far greater complexity between cause and effect, 

 quick to choose the best place, to avoid an obstacle, to pursue with 

 eye and sting the enemy of the hive ? We have seen how the ant un- 

 derstands when an object is too large to pass through the entrance to 

 its cave. The bee, to which we would attribute sensitiveness to regu- 

 larity of lines, certainly has the notion of relations of length. There 

 is a large moth, the death's-head sphinx, very fond of honey, and 

 which asks nothing better than to make its way into the hive; its 

 body, hairy and covered with horny plates, defies the sting. The bees, 

 dreading this unwelcome visit, know very well how to protect them- 

 selves from it in regions where the sphinx abounds. As soon as the 

 earliest ones begin to show themselves in the evenings of the longest 

 days, as M. Blanohard relates, the bees narrow the opening of the hive 

 in such a way that the robber can no longer get in. When the season 

 for this moth has gone by, they desti'oy the new construction, and re- 

 build the passage of its original size. Certainly these are creatures 



