GENERATION OF INSECTS. 427 



the part of the incomplete circumference forms two, three, or more 

 sides of a complete hexagon, demonstrating that this is the form of 

 cell originally and expressly made by the insect, and not the acci- 

 dental and inevitable result of the reciprocal pressure of originally 

 cylindrical cells, moulded upon the bodies of their simultaneously- 

 working fabricators. The parent wasp of this colony began her 

 labours in spring. A solitary mother and independent builder of the 

 required shelter for her offspring, she herself nursed and fed her first 

 brood, which, being non-breeding labourers, soon aided their parent 

 in building the cells and rearing her larvae. You will observe that 

 the full-grown grubs, which require no more food, and are about to 

 fall into the pupa state, are shut in by a transparent convex peUicle, 

 which covers the mouth of the cell. 



In the common wasp, the larva is hatched eight days after ovi- 

 position ; it grows to its full size in twelve to fourteen days, then 

 spins its delicate hood, casts its integument, which has grown with 

 its growth from the time of quitting the egg, and after a passive 

 pupa state of ten days, emerges a perfect insect. The males and 

 perfect females are reared at the beginning of autumn ; the abundance 

 of food yielded by the ripe fruit at that season may influence *he 

 higher development of the larvae, which are fed by the regurgitated 

 contents of the crop of the nurses. 



The fertile females share with the non-breeders or neuters of the 

 rapidly increasing community the labour of rearing the young broods ; 

 the males, or drones, perform no kind of work. At the close of au- 

 tumn, when provender is scanty and hardly to be got, the neuters, 

 by a strange, and, as it would seem, perverted instinct, save the later 

 brood of grubs from the pangs of famine by killing and casting them 

 out of the nest. The young females are impregnated previous to the 

 setting in of winter ; the males soon after die ; the females then dis- 

 perse, seeking winter quarters in sheltered situations ; and those 

 which survive the rigours of the frosty season commence, at the 

 return of spring, the foundation of a new colony. 



The higher instincts of the honey-bee {Apis mellifica) teach it to 

 lay up a winter store of food, upon which, the males having been de- 

 stroyed on the performance of their sole office, the queens, with a 

 family of neuters, subsist till spring. The neuters alone now recom- 

 mence their labours of housing, in waxen cells, the eggs of the fertile 

 female, and feeding the larvae. New colonies so raised successively 

 emigrate from the parent hive or "swarm;" they consist of a queen 

 or fertile female, some males or drones, and perhaps a thousand 

 attendant neuters. Thus the association, which is annually dis- 

 solved and recommenced by the wasp, is permanent in the honey- 



