How Animals Talk 



On its practical or pragmatic side also the theory 

 is a failure, since the things bees are said to do in 

 obedience to an incorporeal swarm instinct are 

 more naturally and more reasonably explained by 

 other causes. Bees swarm, apparently, in the 

 lead or under the influence of individuals; and it 

 needs only a pair of eyes to discover that there are 

 plenty of individual laggards and blunderers in the 

 process. They grow angry not all at once, but suc- 

 cessively; not because a swarm instinct impels 

 them to anger, but because one irritated bee gives 

 off a pungent odor or raises a militant buzzing, 

 and the others smell the odor or hear the buzzing 

 and are inflamed by it, each through his own 

 senses and by the working of his own motives. 

 On a hot day you will see a few bees fanning air 

 into the hive with their wings, and when these 

 grow weary others take their places ; but if it were 

 a swarm instinct that impelled them, you would 

 see all the bees fanning or all sweltering at the 

 same moment. As for the honey-making instinct, 

 on any early-spring day you will find a few bees 

 working in the nearest greenhouse, while the 

 others, which are supposed to be governed by the 

 same collective impulse, are comfortably torpid 

 in the hive or else eating honey faster than these 

 enterprising ones can make it. 



I judge, therefore, that the communistic bees 



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