376 MENTAL EVOLUTION IX ANIMALS. 



we must rank amongst the most wonderful of instincts ; and 

 yet these instincts must often have been dormant during 

 many generations : I refer to the death of the queen, when 

 several worker-larvas are necessarily destroyed, and being- 

 placed in large cells and reared on royal food, are thus 

 rendered fertile : so again when a hive has its queen, the 

 males are all infallibly killed by the workers in autumn ; but 

 if the hive has no queen, not a single drone is ever de- 

 stroyed.* Perhaps a ray of light is thrown by our theory on 

 these mysterious but well ascertained facts, by considering 

 that the analogy of other members of the Bee family would 

 lead us to believe that the Hive-bee is descended from other 

 Bees which regularly had many females inhabiting the same 

 nest during the whole season, and which never destroyed 

 their own males ; so that not to destroy the males and to 

 give the normal food to additional larv?e, perhaps is only a 

 reversion to an ancestral instinct, and, as in the case of 

 corporeal structures reverting, is apt to occur after many 

 generations, t 



I will now refer to a few cases of special difficulty on our 

 theory — most of them parallel to those which I adduced 

 when discussing in Chapter VIII corporeal structures. Thus 

 we occasionally meet with the same peculiar instinct in 

 animals widely remote in the scale of nature, and which conse- 

 quently cannot have derived the pecuHarity from community 

 of descent. The Molothrus (a bird something like a starling) 

 of N. and S. America has precisely the same habits with the 

 Cuckoo ; but parasitism is so common throughout nature that 

 this coincidence is not very surprising. The parallelism in 

 instinct between the White Ants, belonging to the Neurop- 

 tera, and ants belonging to the Hymenoptera, is a far more 

 wonderful fact : but the parallelism seems to be very far from 

 close. Perhaps as remarkable a case as any on record of the 

 same instinct having been independently acquired in two 

 animals very remote from each other in relationship, is that 

 of a ISTeuropterous and a Dipterous larva diggmg a conical 



* Kirhy and Spence, Entomology, voL ii, pp. 510-13. 



t [Concerning tlie question wliy there are so many drones as to require 

 killing, see Animal Intelligence, p. 166, wliere I suggest that among tlie 

 ancestors of tlie Hive-bee the males may haA-e been of use as workers. But 

 possibly the drones may even now be of use as nurses to the larvse, for I am 

 told by an experienced bee-keeper that he believes this to be the case. — 

 a. J. E.] 



