SOME STRANGE MARRIAGE-CUSTOMS 295 



fact that the queen of the Hive-bees is relieved of all 

 work from the first, and so is enabled to devote her whole 

 energies to the duties of reproduction. She is the 

 descendant of a race of queens which in earlier times, 

 like the Bumble-bee queen, had to perform the duties 

 now relegated to her daughters, who inherit not only her 

 house-building and child-nurturing instincts, but also her 

 potentiality for child-bearing, though this potentiality 

 is commonly inhibited by the starvation of the repro- 

 ductive activities. Selection secures survival of this state 

 of affairs by the elimination of any tendency to lose any 

 of these qualities on the part of the queen. The workers 

 of the Hive-bee, in short, have not evolved their pecu- 

 liarities of structure and instinct by some mysterious 

 process of natural selection confined to the workers 

 individually, for these, being infertile, could not transmit 

 any of their inherent qualities or tendencies to variation 

 in the direction of more efficient workers. On the con- 

 trary, all that they possess they inherit from the queen- 

 mother, who transmits to her offspring the qualities and 

 characteristics her forebears in the female line possessed in 

 their own person. 



