280 THE BEE NATION. 



progressed. But although the queens and drones do not 

 now work yet the capacities inherited from earlier times 

 still remain to them, especially to the former, and are kept alive 

 and fresh by the impressions constantly made upon them 

 during life, and they are thus in a position to transmit them 

 to their posterity. In any case the now so firmly established 

 condition of the bee State, resting as it does on a steady 

 historical past, agrees with this idea of capacities acquired 

 by the force of heredity, but no longer capable of further 

 development or perfectibility. 



The views here expressed become almost a certainty when 

 we learn from Graber (loc. cit. ii., p. 88, etc.) that the 

 queen, although owing to the division of labor in the bee 

 State she has no longer need of it, still possesses the col- 

 lecting baskets on the hind legs so indispensable to the 

 working-bees as a rudiment or remainder from the earlier 

 time when she was an ordinary worker, while on the other 

 hand, as before-mentioned, the workers possess rudimentary 

 ovaries. " The worker," adds Graber, " is thus a mutilated 

 queen, and the queen an emancipated worker." Therefore 

 again, as we have mentioned before, is it possible for 

 workers occasionally to set themselves up as queens, doubt- 

 less in remembrance of their former more exalted position ! 



That this opinion, if correct, would also apply to the other 

 social insects, and especially to ants supposing that the 

 force of heredity in explaining their capacities and habits 

 cannot be denied scarcely requires special argument. But 

 that these capacities and habits, when once present, should 

 be similarly repeated in each new colony cannot seem 

 strange, owing to the planting of new colonies from the old 

 or by the mothers. The young bees and ants have only in 

 all cases to follow the example of the older ones which 

 they have before them, and the faculty of imitation is, as we 

 see by countless examples, a chief characteristic of common 

 work in all social insects, as among men. 



But to return once again to the constitution and arrange- 

 ments of the bee State, it must be admitted, on unprejudiced 

 observation, that the idea of a well-ordered State, politically 

 and socially, is here indeed almost attained. There is 

 among them no standing army, as among other insects 

 related to them and among men, but the State seeks pro- 

 tection (in cultivated hives become partly unnecessary) 



