260 DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION 



Wasps, bees, and ants provide many familiar examples 

 of colonial organizations that become all the more mar- 

 velous on closer acquaintance, on account of their 

 resemblances to human associations on the one hand, 

 and to cell-associations on the other. Their illustrative 

 beauty is enhanced by their wide variety, for they grade 

 from counterparts of highly civilized men down to a 

 savage among insects, such as the strictly solitary 

 digger-wasp, whose instincts served to exemplify the 

 insect type of "mentality" in the discussions of the 

 preceding chapter. 



The true communities founded by wasps and hornets 

 must be assigned to a low grade in the scale because they 

 originate during a single season and break up at its 

 end; for this very reason the wasp community is in- 

 tensely interesting to the student of comparative social 

 evolution. In the spring a solitary female emerges 

 from the crevice where she has hibernated and resumes 

 active life ; she feeds for a time to renew her strength 

 and then she constructs a simple nest of mud or masti- 

 cated wood-pulp. In the first few cells of this nest she 

 deposits her eggs, and when they hatch she herself 

 provides the larvae with food, but still continues to 

 enlarge the house and to produce more eggs. Thus 

 during the first few weeks of the colony's existence this 

 single individual performs a variety of tasks of racial as 

 well as of purely egoistic value ; but as time goes on, a 

 profound change comes about in her activities and in 

 the life of the whole community. The members of the 

 first brood do not grow into counterparts of their mother ; 

 they are all sexless "workers" who progressively relieve 

 their parent of the tasks of nest-building and foraging 



