THE BEE. 



not merely the art of offensive war, and can play the part of the 

 common soldier, but is also a consummate military engineer ; 

 and it is not against the death's-head moth alone that it shows 

 itself capable of erecting such defences. 



166. Thinly peopled hives are sometimes attacked by the popu- 

 lation of other bee cities. In such cases, incapable of immediate 

 defence by reason of their inferior numbers, they erect similar 

 fortifications, but in this case they make the wickets in the walls 

 so small that a single worker only can pass through them ; and a 

 small number stationed on the inside of these openings, are accord- 

 ingly sufficient to defend the hive against the attack of large 

 besieging armies. 



167. But when the season for swarming arrived, these works of 

 defence, whether constructed against the invasion of the moth or 

 hostile bees, became an impracticable obstruction to the exit of 

 the succession of emigrating colonies, and were therefore demo- 

 lished, and were not reconstructed without pressing necessity. 

 Thus the works constructed in 1804 against the invasions of the 

 moth were taken down in the swarming season of 1805 ; and as 

 the plunderers did not re-appear in that year, they were not re- 

 ereoted. But in the autumn of 1807, the moths appearing in 

 great numbers, the bees immediately erected strong barricades, 

 and thus effectually prevented the disaster with which their 

 population was menaced. In the next swarming season, in May 

 1808, these works were again demolished. 



It ought to be observed, that whenever the door of the hive 

 is itself too small to admit the moth, the bees erect no defences 

 against it.* 



168. One of the most interesting and, at the same time, most 

 difficult question connected with the faculties of insects, is that of 

 the number and nature of their senses. It has been often and truly 

 said, that no being, however intelligent, can form even the most 

 obscure notion of a sense of which he is himself deprived. The 

 man deprived of sight, to whom the colour scarlet was elaborately 

 described, said that his notion of it was that of the sound of a 

 trumpet. Granting then the possibility that insects may be 

 endowed with a peculiar sense, or mode of perception, of which 

 ■we are destitute, we are in no condition to form a conception 

 of the power or impressions of such a sense, any more than the 

 blind man was who attempted to acquire a conception of a red 

 colour. 



But without supposing the possible existence of peculiar senses 

 independent of the five with which we are endowed, it may be 

 that the very organs which we possess may be given with an infi- 

 ^^ * Huter, ii. 293—298. 



