EVOLUTION 1085 



emotions — and that raises the whole question of the chiselling of 

 the face from within. For every normal human face bears evidence 

 of having been moulded by mind ! 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE HIVE.— We have already pictured 

 the organisation of honey-bees, but now the question rises : How has 

 all this wonderful hive-life come about ? A difficult question indeed, 

 if we seek a detailed and circumstantial answer; yet not so difficult 

 to answer in outline, unless we raise the deeper question : By what 

 factors has the evolution of social bees been advanced from stage 

 to stage? Keeping to the first, the more descriptive question, we 

 may notice, first of all, that just as solitary wasps have given origin 

 to simple and these to more intricate communities of wasps, so 

 hive-bees (Apis) have arisen from solitary bees through intermediate 

 phases such as are represented by the familiar summer community 

 of the humble-bee (Bombus). 



We need not complicate the problem by inquiring what man has 

 done for the hive-bee since he half-domesticated it in pre-historic 

 times. He has certainly sophisticated the honey-bee since the days 

 when he induced it to store its treasures in a hollow log near his 

 dwelling, but we may be sure that he did not teach it sociality. The 

 original honey-bees which became man's hive-bees were already 

 social in the wild state, just as sheep were of course gregarious before 

 they were domesticated. At the same time it must be admitted that 

 man has left his mark on his bees, for he had to do with them before 

 3500 B.C. We know the price of strained honey in the time of the 

 Pharaohs ! 



Before there were bees there were wasps, and the first chapter in 

 our story is the divergence of bees (in the wide sense) from primitive 

 wasps. These ancestors were somewhat like the burrowing Sphex, 

 whose relatives we sometimes see disappearing into little tunnels 

 on the roadside. This divergence of bees from wasps seems to have 

 occurred at least twice, for entomologists distinguish two distinct 

 lines — one leading to primitive bees like the waspish Prosopis, which 

 makes silk-lined cells in bramble-stems, or in the earth, or in the 

 mortar of walls; and the other line leading to the higher bees. So 

 the first proposition, put bluntly, is that from solitary wasps there 

 evolved solitary bees ; and the evolution was associated with giving 

 up carnivorous habits, and becoming wholly dependent on the nectar 

 and pollen of flowers. A great many evolutionary steps have had to 

 do with bread and butter. As Claude Bernard said, exaggerating a 

 truth, evolution is a question of nutrition all through the ages. 

 "Man ist was er isst" is another exaggeration of a substantial grain 

 of truth. 



The next step was the establishment of an immense variety of 

 solitary bees, adapted to different kinds of flowers. It must be kept 



