—7i — 



food they can obtain. She gives herself up more and more exclusively 

 to the work of reproduction, and her powers increase till she becomes 

 capable of changing food into eggs and individually starting a hundred 

 thousand existences in her single lifetime. 



Between this highest type of the bee and the lowest, we find several 

 hundred varieties all capable of explanation, either as progressive or re- 

 trogressive, developments from our primitive bee. Many of them are 

 highly specialized in their social habits, and it seems tome that all those 

 that have two fully developed sexes and one or more undeveloped sexes, 

 must neccessarily have thrift, intelligence and love, as the foundation with- 

 out which it is impossible that such creatures should of themselves build 

 up such a singular condition. 



It seems to me that hunger, something approaching starvation, is 

 necessary as a beginning of the specialization. Now we all know that 

 from their capacity to increase with enormous rapidity, some insects are 

 subject to great vicissitudes in the matter of food. The locusts, for in- 

 stance, increase in numbers till having eaten everything in their native 

 habitat, they leave it in dense masses that obscure the heavens, and which 

 devastate vast regions. Of the next brood, immensely more vast in 

 numbers than even these, comparatively a small remnant reach maturity, 

 and scarcely any reproduce their kind. The race grows up again from 

 the few starved individuals too weak to leave the old habitat and of which 

 a few managed to survive long enough to lay some eggs. Those doubt- 

 less produce many imperfect insects, but these specializations are not use- 

 ful to the race in this case, and they cannot survive. I think it likely 

 however, that man could specialize locusts and many other insects in this 

 way without difficulty. I think it likely that he could with great care 

 so specialize fish and possibly fowls and with great patience and much 

 difficulty some of the mammals. I think also that if mules were from a 

 thrifty hoarding stock like squirrels they would be in the habit of feeding 

 the old mare as the workers feed the mother-bee. But while it may be 

 allowable to mention these as interesting possibilities I do not propose to 

 discuss them in this paper. 



There is another element which is, I think, very important in fixing 

 the definite type of the workers, and whicn 1 had intended to discuss. 

 But while I think that element important in the bee and perhaps abso- 

 lutely necessary for the still higher specialization of the ant, I think also 

 that a permanent body of workers is necessarily evolved from the condi- 

 tions which I have assumed as natural and proper to the primitive bee. 



To recapitulale in few words: 



