INSTINCT OF INSECTS. 587 



the working-bees of a hive to their queen ; the singular imprisonment in 

 which they retain the young queens that are to lead off a swarm, until 

 their wings be sufficiently expanded to enable them to fly the moment 

 they are at liberty, gradually paring away the waxen wall that confines 

 them to their cell to an extreme thinness, and only suffering it to be 

 broken down at the precise moment required ; the attention with which, 

 in these circumstances, they feed the imprisoned queen by frequently 

 putting honey upon her proboscis, protruded from a small orifice in the 

 lid of her cell ; the watchfulness with which, when at the period of 

 swarming more queens than one are required, they place a guard over the 

 cells of those undisclosed, to preserve them from the jealous fury of their 

 excluded rivals ; the exquisite calculation with which they invariably 

 release the oldest queens the first from their confinement ; the singular love 

 of monarchical dominion, by which, when two queens in other circum- 

 stances are produced, they are led to impel them to combat until one is 

 destroyed ; the ardent devotion which binds them to the fate and fortunes 

 of the survivor ; the distraction which they manifest at her loss, and 

 their resolute determination not to accept of any stranger until an interval 

 has elapsed sufficiently long to allow of no chance of the return of 

 their rightful sovereign; and (to omit a further enumeration) the obe- 

 dience which in the utmost noise and confusion they show to her well- 

 known hum. 



I have now instanced at least thirty distinct instincts with which every 

 individual of the nurses'amongst the working-bees is endowed; and if to 

 the account be added their care to carry from the hive the dead bodies of 

 any of the community ; their pertinacity in their battles, in directing their 

 sting at those parts only of the bodies of their adversaries which are 

 penetrable by it ; their annual autumnal murder of the drones, &c. 

 &,c. — it is certain that this number might be very considerably increased, 

 perhaps doubled. 



At the first view you will be inclined to suspect some fallacy in this 

 enumeration, and that this vaiiety of actions ought to be referred rather 

 to some general principle, capable of accommodating itself to different 

 circumstances, than to so many different kinds of instinct. But to what 

 principle ? Not to reason, the faculty to which we assign this power of 

 varying accommodation. All the actions above adduced come strictly 

 under the description of instinctive actions, being all performed by every 

 generation of bees since the creation of the world, and as perfectly a day 

 or two after their birth as at any subsequent period. And as the very 

 essence of instinct consists in the determinate character of the actions to 

 which it gives birth, it is clear that every distinctly different action must 

 be referred to a distinct instinct. Few will dispute that the instinct which 

 leads a duck to resort to the water is a different instinct from that which 

 leads her to sit upon her eggs ; for the hen, though endowed with one, is 

 not with the other. In fact, they are as distinct and unconnected as the 

 senses of sight and smell ; and it appears to me that it would be as 

 contrary to philosophical accuracy of language in the former case to call 

 the two instincts modifications of each other, as in the latter so to desig- 

 nate the two senses ; and as we say that a deaf and blind man has fewer 

 senses than other men, so (strictly) we ought not to speak of instinct as 



