Phillips. — On the Comb of the Hive-bee. 489 



exactly alike, and as mathematically correct as a spider's web? 

 What is it that keeps these angles uniform right through the 

 comb-wall? — for a well-constructed oblique angle is not a 

 mere blind sweeping of a sphere. 



To give Darwin every credit, which I naturally wish to give 

 to so great a writer, I will say this: that, if this instance of 

 natural selection in regard to the hive-bee cell he has given 

 us offers any proof of his theory to scientific minds (I regret 

 it does not to mine), then at best it is but an exemplification 

 of the law of progressive adaptation of species. The hive-bee, 

 the humble-bee, and Meliioona domestica are each useful for 

 its particular work. Eed-clover, for instance, in New Zealand 

 could not be fertilised until we introduced the humble-bee. It 

 is also said in Canterbury that the humble-bee in some places 

 takes all the honey from the flowers, leaving little or none 

 for the hive-bee. The cell of the humble-bee should there- 

 fore be far superior to the cell of the hive-bee. But Darwin 

 places the cell of the humble-bee at the bottom of the scale, 

 and most unmistakably says that Melipona domestica and 

 the hive-bee cells have been naturally selected from it. To 

 say that the humble-bee is evolved by natural selection from 

 the hive-bee, or vice versa, or that the hive-bee cell is naturally 

 selected from the Mexican-bee cell, looks to me quite absurd, 

 even from Darwin's own proof. As Pierre Huber distinctly 

 says, "The Mexican-bee cell looks like a gross imitation of a 

 portion of the hive-bee cell." Moreover, we have in New 

 Zealand many native bees which build simple single cells in 

 the ground for storing their food. The humble-bee cell is 

 almost a clay cell. Wasps in Europe build their nests of clay. 

 But all these are quite ditferent structures to the finished ceil 

 of wax of the hive-bee. Again, even in the hive-bee ceils there 

 is no blind sweeping of equal spheres, seeing that the cells for 

 the queen-bees are considerably larger than those for the com- 

 mon bees of the hive, and are also differently constructed." 



* I attach the following description of the cell-formation and work of 

 the queen-bee as bearing upon the question. I regret my inability to give 

 the author's name : " The province and occupation of the queen-bee 

 consist in laying the eggs from which originate the prodigious multitudes 

 that people a hive. Every bee in the community is apparently aware of 

 this fact, and consequently treats her with due respect, even to the extent 

 of never turning its back upon her until, the liive being overcrowded and 

 a new queen having been made, a swarm is thought necessary, when all 

 respect disappears, and, should she show the least reluctance, she is 

 forced out to seek new quarters with other emigrants. The creation of a 

 queen is one of the greatest wonders of that most wonderful of insect 

 communities — a hive of bees ; for no sooner does the old queen die, or the 

 members of the community become convinced that they are overcrowded, 

 and that a swarm is necessary, than they begin to build one or more 

 queen-cells, which are utterly unlike the well-known hexagonal cells in 

 which honey is stored or the brood of either workers or drones is reared, 



