INSTINCT OF INSECTS. 557 



dinary situation in which the community stands, leading them now to 

 regard with kindness the drones, for whom otherwise they would have felt 

 the most violent aversion. 



In this instance, indeed, it would perhaps be more strictly correct to say 

 (which, however, is equally wonderful) that the old instinct was extin- 

 guished ; but in the case of the loss of a queen, to which I am next to 

 advert, which is followed by positive operations, the extraordinary develop 

 ment of a new and peculiar instinct is indisputable. 



In a hive which no untoward event has deprived of its queen, the 

 workers take no other active steps in the education of her successors 

 those of which one is to occupy her place when she has flown off at the 

 head of a new swarm in spring than to prepare a certain number of 

 cells of extraordinary capacity for their reception while in the egg, and 

 to feed them when become grubs with a peculiar food until they have at- 

 tained maturity. This, therefore, is their ordinary instinct ; and it may 

 happen that the workers of a hive may have no necessity for a long series 

 of successive generations to exercise any other. But suppose them to lose 

 their queen. Far from sinking into that inactive despair which was for- 

 merly attributed to them, after the commotion which the rapidly-circulated 

 news of their calamity gave birth to has subsided, they betake themselves 

 with an alacrity from which man when under misfortune might deign to take 

 a lesson, to the active reparation of their loss. Several ordinary cells, as was 

 before related at large, are without delay pulled down, and converted into 

 a variable number of royal cells, capacious enough for the education of one 

 or more queen-grubs selected out of the unhoused working grubs which 

 in this pressing emergency are mercilessly sacrificed and fed with the ap- 

 propriate royal food to maturity. Thus sure of once more acquiring a 

 head, the hive return to their ordinary labours, and in about sixteen days 

 one or more queens are produced ; one of which, after being indebted to 

 fortune for an elevation as singular as that of Catherine the First of 

 Russia, steps into day and assumes the reins of state. 



To this remarkable deviation from the usual procedures of the commu- 

 nity, the observations above made in the case of the drones must be 

 applied. We cannot account for it by conceiving the working-bees to be 

 acquainted with the end which their operations have in view. If we sup- 

 pose them to know that the queen and working-grubs are originally the 

 same, and that to convert one of the latter into the former it is only neces- 

 sary to transfer it to an apartment sufficiently spacious and to feed it with a 

 peculiar food, we confer upon them a depth of reason to which Prome- 

 theus, when he made his clay man, had no pretensions an original dis- 

 covery, in short, to which man has but just attained after some thousand 

 years of painful research, having escaped all the observers of bees from 

 Aristomachus to Swammerdam and Reaumur of modern times. We have 

 no other alternative, then, but to refer this phenomenon to the extraor- 

 dinary development of a new instinct suited for the exigency, however in- 

 comprehensible to us the manner of its excitement may appear. 



II. Such, then, are the exquisiteness, the number, and the extraordinary 

 development of the instincts of insects. But is instinct the sole guide of 

 their actions ? Are they in every case the blind agents of irresistible im- 

 pulse ? These queries, I have already hinted, cannot in my opinion be 

 replied to in the affirmative j and I now proceed to show that though in- 



