PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE 



CHAPTER XVII 



LOVE AMONG SOCIAL ANIMALS 



Organization of reproduction among hymenoptera. Bees. 

 Wedding of the queen. Mother bee, cause and con- 

 sciousness of the hive. Sexual royalty. Limits of in- 

 telligence among bees. Natural logic and human 

 logic. Wasps. Bumble-bees. Ants. Notes on their 

 habits. Very advanced state of their civilization. 

 Slavery and parasitism among ants. Termites. The 

 nine principal active forms of termites. Great age of 

 their civilization. Beavers. Tendency of industrious 

 animals to inactivity. 



SOCIAL hymenoptera, bumble-bees, hornets, wasps, bees, 

 have peculiar love customs very different from those of 

 other animal species. It is not monogamy, since one 

 finds in it nothing resembling the couple, nor polygamy, 

 since the males know only one female, when they have 

 even that adventure, and since the females are fecundated 

 for the whole of their life by a single fecundation. It is, 

 rather, a sort of matriarchate, even though the queen bee 

 is not generally the mother of more than a part of the 

 hive whereover she rules, the other part having sprung 

 from the queen who has gone off with the new swarm, or 

 from the one who has remained in the former hive. In 

 very numerous hives there are about six or seven hun- 

 157 



