INSTINCT AND INTELLIGBNCH 



Iif excavating her tunnel, the carpenter bee has detached a large 

 quantity of fibres, Tvhich lie on the ground like a heap of sawdust. 

 This material supplies all her wants. Having deposited an egg at 

 the bottom of the cylinder along with the requisite store of pollen 

 and honey, she next, at the height of about three-quarters of an 

 inch (which is the depth of each cell), constructs of particles of 

 the sawdust, glued together, and also to the sides of the tunnel, 

 what may be called an annular stage or scaffolding. When this 

 is sufficiently hardened, its interior edge affords support for a 

 second ring of the same materials, and thus the ceiling is gradually 

 formed of these concentric circles, till there remains only a small 

 orifice in its centre, which is also closed with a circular mass of 

 agglutinated particles of sawdust. When this partition, which 

 serves as the ceiling of the first cell and the fiooring of the second, 

 is finished, it is about the thickness of a crown piece, and exhibits 

 the appearance of as many concentric circles as the animal has 

 made pauses in her labour. One cell being finished, she proceeds 

 to another, which she furnishes and completes in the same manner, 

 and so on until she has divided her whole tunnel into ten or 

 twelve apartments. 



When the work here described is considered, it is evident that 

 its execution must require a long period of hard labour. The 

 several cells must be cut out, their floors agglutinated, and they 

 must be each supplied with a store of honey and pollen, the col- 

 lection and accumulation of which is a labour which must 

 occupy a considerable interval of time ; and as the eggs are 

 deposited successively in the cells according as they are finished 

 and furnished, it is evident that they must be at any given 

 moment in very different states of progress, the young issuing 

 from those fijst deposited many days before the latest break the 

 shell. But since there are ten or twelve such chambers 

 ■vertically superposed, and since the lowest are the first laid, 

 the new-born larva would either be condemned to be imprisoned 

 in its cell until the births of all those above it should take place, 

 or, in escaping to the exterior, it woidd have to pass through the 

 chambers of all the others not yet developed, and would thus 

 damage or destroy them. The beneficent Creator of the insect 

 has, however, endowed it with an instinct which supplies the 

 place of the foresight necessary to provide against such a cata- 

 strophe. With admirable forethought she constructs, besides 

 the door already mentioned leading from cell to cell, another 

 orifice in the lowest cell, which serves as a sort of postern, through 

 which the insects produced from the earliest eggs emerge into day. 

 In fact, all the young bees, even the uppermost, make their exit 

 by this road ; for each grub, when about to pass into the state of 

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