5.58 INSTINCT OF INSECTS. 



proceed to the third head, under which I proposed to consider the instincts 

 of insects that of their extraordinary development. 



The development of some of the instincts of the larger animals, such as 

 those of sex, is -well known to depend upon their age and the peculiar 

 state of the bodily organs ; and to this, as before observed, the succession 

 of different instincts in the same insect, in its larva and perfect state, is 

 closely analogous. But what I have now in view is that extraordinary de- 

 velopment of instinct which is dependent not upon the age or any change 

 in the organisation of the animal, but upon external events which in in- 

 dividuals of the same species, age, and structure, in some circumstances 

 slumbers unmoved, but may in others be excited to the most singular and 

 unlooked-for action. In illustrating this property of instinct, which, as 

 far as I am aware, is not known to occur in any of the larger animals, I 

 shall confine myself as before to the hive-bee ; the only insect, indeed , 

 in which its existence has been satisfactorily ascertained, though it is 

 highly probable that other species living in societies may exhibit the same 

 phenomenon. 



Several of the facts occurring in the history of bees might be referred to 

 this head ; but I shall here advert only to the treatment of the drones by 

 the workers under different circumstances, and to the operations of the 

 latter consequent upon the irretrievable loss of the queen facts which 

 have been before stated to you, but to the principal features of which my 

 present argument makes it necessary that I should again direct your 

 attention. 



If a hive of bees be this year in possession of a queen duly fertilised, 

 and consequently sure the next season of a succession of males, all the drones, 

 as I have before stated, towards the approach of winter are massacred by 

 the workers with the most unrelenting ferocity. To this seemingly cruel 

 course they are doubtless impelled by an imperious instinct ; and as it 

 is regularly followed in every hive thus circumstanced, it would seem at the 

 first view to be an impulse as intimately connected with the organisation 

 and very existence of the workers, and as incapable of change, as that 

 which leads them to build cells or to store up honey. But this is far from 

 being the case. However certain the doom of the drones this autumn if the 

 hive be furnished with a duly fertilised queen, their undisturbed existence 

 over the winter is equally sure if the hive have lost its sovereign, or her 

 impregnation have been so retarded as to make a succession of males in 

 the spring doubtful. In such a hive the workers do not destroy a 

 single drone, though the hottest persecution rages in all the hives around 

 them. 



Now, how are we to explain this difference of conduct ? Are we 

 to suppose that the bees know and reason upon this alteration in the cir- 

 cumstances of their community that they infer the possibility of their 

 entire extinction if the whole male stock were destroyed when without a 

 queen and that thus influenced by a wise policy they restrain the fury 

 they would otherwise have exercised ? This would be at once to make 

 them not only gifted with reason, but endowed with a power of looking 

 before and after, and a command over the strongest natural propensities, 

 superior to what could be expected in a similar case even from a society 

 of men, and is obviously unwarrantable. The only probable suppo- 

 sition is, clearly, that a new instinct is developed suited to the extraor- 



