i512 INSTINCT OF INSECTS* 



quiring' a head, the hive return to their ordinary la- 

 bours, and in about sixteen days one or more queen? 

 are produced; one of which, after being- indebted tc 

 fortune for an elevation as singular as that of Cathe- 

 rine the First of Russia, steps into day and assumes 

 the reins of state. 



To this remarkable deviation from the usual pro- 

 cedures of the community, the observations above made 

 in the case of the drones must be applied. We can- 

 not account for it by conceiving the working bees to 

 be acquainted with the end which their operations have 

 in view. If we suppose them to know that the queen 

 and working-grubs ai-e originally the same, and that to 

 convert one of the latter into the former it is only ne- 

 cessary to transfer it to an apartment sufficiently spa- 

 cious and to feed it with a peculiar food, we confer 

 upon them a depth of reason to which Prometheus, 

 when he made his clay man, had no pretensions — an 

 original discovery, in short, to which man has but just 

 attained after some thousand years of painful research, 

 having escaped all the observers of bees from Aristo- 

 machus to Swammerdam and Reaumur of modern 

 times. We have no other alternative, then, but to 

 refer this phenomenon to the extraordinary develop- 

 ment of a new instinct suited for the exigency, how- 

 ever incomprehensible to us the manner of its exciter 

 ment rfiay appear. 



II. Such, theii; are the exquiisiteness, the number, 

 and the extraordinary development of the instincts of 

 insects. But is instinct the sole guide of their actions : 

 Are thev in every case tlie blind ai^ents of irresistible 



