590 INSTINCT OF INSECTS. 



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

 drones, as 1 l)ave before stated, towards the approach of winter are mas- 

 sacred by the workers with the most unrelenting ferocity. To this seem- 

 ingly 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 

 organization 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 fertilized queen, their undis- 

 turbed 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 suc- 

 cession 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 circum- 

 stances 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 supposition is, clearly, that 

 a new instinct is developed suited to the extraordinary 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 attained 

 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 suc- 

 cessive generations to exercise any other. But suppose them to lose their 

 queen. Far from sinking into that inactive despair which was formerly 

 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 — 



