52 A PHILOSOPHER WITH NATURE 



so sunk in barbarism as to be quite incapable of 

 even unconsciously entertaining any designs which 

 had not a direct bearing on the interest of number 

 one. The habits of the humble bee, still living a 

 single-handed existence for a great part of the 

 year, have made it necessary for her to retain a good 

 deal of this primitive wisdom, and even to cultivate 

 it. The development of the two branches of the 

 family has been on entirely different lines. The 

 humble bees in fact have not yet learnt to sacrifice 

 the individual to the community, and despite their 

 very rude social economy, and the popular prejudice 

 against them in consequence, it is not at all improb- 

 able that we may have yet to allow that the individual 

 humble bee is in advance of her cousin the hive bee 

 in " general intelligence." 



I need not refer amongst other things to the intelli- 

 gence displayed particularly by the members of the 

 underground species, in their ingenious plan of 

 getting at the honey in some flowers by piercing 

 the corolla, a habit which the hive bees are ready 

 enough to take advantage of without having the 

 intelligence to imitate it. There is a sense of 

 individuality about the humble bee which it is 

 hardly possible to attach to a single bee of the hive 

 species. One sunny day in March I captured a 

 large female of the species Bombus terrestris on the 

 willows in the wood above Weston-super-Mare. 

 Taking her to London with me, I placed her in an 

 empty nest in which I had kept a colony the previous 

 year, and having filled part of the empty comb 

 with honey and given her a supply of pollen I was 

 in hopes that she might be induced to rear a young 

 family under observation. I was, however, dis- 



