VI E VIDENCE OF INTELLIGENCE IN HONE YCOMB 28& 



A very irregular piece of comb placed on a very smooth table 

 vibrated so much and so continually that the humble-bees 

 could not work on it. In order to prevent the vibration, two 

 or three of them held the comb fast, by setting their fore feet on 

 the table and the hind feet on the comb. By relieving one 

 another they continued this for three days, until the necessary 

 supporting columns of wax were finished.-^ Darwin, according 

 to Eomanes,^ justly remarks in his posthumous manuscript, 

 that such a case could scarcely have ever occurred in nature. 

 Self- evidently the animals must have acted entirely from 

 reflection upon the particular circumstances ; they acted like 

 the ants in the two last-mentioned cases, not instinctively, but 

 intelligently. 



The construction of the honeycomb by bees seems to be the 

 work of pure instinct. But it is proved by experiments made 

 by Huber that the insects vary the structure of the comb in 

 accordance with external circumstances, and these likewise are 

 experiments which have no counterpart in nature, so that the 

 bees here again must have based their arrangements on the 

 results of intelligent reflection. It is clear that the building of 

 the comb requires very considerable instinctive dexterity, that 

 it must with regard to its essential character be reckoned among 

 constructive instincts ; but reflection seems not to have been 

 completely eliminated from it, it seems to be by no means 

 a perfectly unmixed instinct. The view that the cells, as Herr 

 Mullenhoff^ has recently attempted to prove, arise quite 

 mechanically through the mutual pressure of the bodies of the 

 bees at work, whereby they must necessarily become hexagonal, 

 is certainly unfounded. Any one who has once examined the 

 edge of an unfinished comb will admit this. Towards the edge 

 of such a comb the cells gradually diminish in height. The 



^ p. Huber Fils, Observations sur pliisieurs genres de bourdons, bombinatrices 

 de Linni, Transact. Linn Soc. vol. vi. pp. 214-299, London, 1801. 

 2 Romanes, loc. cit. p. 225. 



^ Pfliiger's Archiv fur die gesavimte Physiologie, vol. xxxii. pp. 589-618. 



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