WILD BEES 57 



which \ the crop of young queens is subjected, the 

 workers being robbed of their proper quota of food 

 to supply the wants of what may not inaptly be 

 called a bloated aristocracy. 



This case of neuters or sterile females among the 

 social Hymenoptera is one of the deepest interest 

 in all its bearings. Darwin, while explaining in the 

 " Origin of Species " the action of natural selection 

 here, has left it on record that the case presented 

 to him difficulties which at first appeared insuperable, 

 and actually fatal to the whole theory of natural 

 selection. The question of sex among the humble 

 bees is most interesting, as tending to throw some 

 light upon the subject where it presents more 

 difficulties, namely, amongst the hive bees. Amongst 

 the humble bees the differentiation of sex has hardly 

 begun. The queen performs the duties of an ordinary 

 worker for part of the year, and the worker female 

 differs little from her in anything beyond what may 

 easily be understood as under-development conse- 

 quent upon less generous feeding during the larva 

 stage. But with the hive bees the divergence is 

 far wider and more significant, involving not only 

 difference in development but in instinct, and what 

 is more important, in structure. The queen of 

 the humble bees, like the neuters, possesses pollen- 

 collecting appendages, and a curved almost unbarbed 

 sting (which does not remain in the wound), which 

 heritage she of course still transmits intact to her 

 royal descendants and to the neuters. Now the 

 queen of the hive species, besides differing altogether 

 from the neuters in instinct, has lost, with other 

 slight peculiarities, the pollen-collecting appendages, 

 but she still preserves the power of transmitting 



