86 Bulletin American Museum of Natural History. [\o\. XXIII, 



social wasps, bumble-bees, ants and termites, the female is the complete 

 prototype of her sex. Even in the slave-making ants, as I have shown in a 

 former article,^ she manifests in the founding of her colonies all the threptic 

 instincts once supposed to be the exclusive prerogative of the worker caste. 

 These may be called the primary instincts. After the colony is established, 

 however, and she no longer needs to manifest these instincts, she becomes a 

 mere egg-laying machine and her instincts undergo a corresponding change. 

 These may now be designated as secondary instincts. She thus passes 

 through a gamut of instincts successively called into activity by a series of 

 stimuli which in turn arise in a definite order from her changing social 

 environment. The workers, however, are capable of repeating only a por- 

 tion of the female gamut, the primary series. In gynfecoid individuals there 

 is also a tendency to take up the secondary series, but in most workers this 

 has been suppressed by countless generations of nutricial castration. The 

 social insects of this type may be called gyncecotelic, to indicate that the 

 female has preserved intact the full series of sexual attributes inherited from 

 her solitary ancestors. In these the primary and secondary series were 

 simultaneous or overlapped completely, in the gynfecotelic social insects they 

 are extended over a longer period of time and overlap only in part, as social 

 life permits the extension of the secondary long after the primary series has 

 lapsed into desuetude. It will be seen that the division of labor which led 

 to the spacial differentiation of like females into workers and queens is 

 clearly foreshadowed in the consecutive differentiation of instincts in the 

 individual queen. 



The second group of social insects is represented by the honey-bees and 

 probably also by the stingless bees (Meliponidje). In these insects only the 

 secondary instincts are manifested in the queen, while the worker retains the 

 primary series in full vigor and thus more clearly represents the ancestral 

 female of the species. This type may therefore be called ergatoielic? 



The suppression of the primary instincts in the queen honey-bee was 

 undoubtedly brought about by a change in the method of colony formation. 

 When the habit of swarming superseded the establishment of colonies by 

 solitary queens, as still practiced by the gynfecotelic insects, the primary 

 instincts of the female lapsed into abeyance or became latent. This change 

 took place so long ago that it has had time to express itself in the structure 

 of the queen honey-bee as compared with the worker (shorter tongue and 

 wings, feebler sting, degenerate structure of hind legs, etc.). 



1 On the Founding of Colonies by Queen Ants, etc., loc. cit. 



2 The distinction of gynfecotelic and ergatotelic types corresponds with Cook's "principles 

 of matriarchy and ergatarchy" (The Social Organization and Breeding Habits of the Cotton- 

 protecting Kelep of Guatemala. U. S. Depart. Agric, Bull. Entom., Tech. Series No. 10, 1905, 

 p. 34). These terms are objectionable because they imply an erroneous, not to say anthropo- 

 morphic, conception of governing or ruling on the part of the queen or workers. 



