INSTINCT 211 



is queenless, to permit them to live through the win- 

 ter, could not have existed before the workers were 

 produced. 



Without dwelling on this further it is evident that 

 many of the instincts of workers must have been 

 evolved, if at all, after the workers were evolved as a 

 distinct class. In assuming this, however, we are 

 met by the insurmountable difficulty of accounting 

 for numerous instincts of the highest order without 

 the advantage of heredity. The workers possess 

 many remarkable powers entirely different in kind 

 from those which any of their ancestors ever pos- 

 sessed. They cannot have improved these instincts 

 and thus have built them up by inheritance from the 

 queens and drones, for the latter never possessed 

 them. And since the workers leave no offspring the 

 possibility of heredity is excluded. 



We see, therefore, the impossibility of applying the 

 principle of heredity in order to account for the 

 accumulation of these many high instincts. It is 

 evident also that their existence cannot be explained 

 by the principle of reversion, for no ancestors could 

 have ever possessed these instincts. 



I see no possible theory, therefore, by which to 

 account for the evolution of this class of instincts in 

 the workers among bees. 



That which produces the differences now between 

 queens and workers is, so far as we can discover, the 

 difference in the size and position of the cells, and 

 the fact that the queen3 are reared on royal jelly, 

 while the larvae of the workers are fed on bee-bread. 

 The feeding of the larvae lasts less than a week, and 

 their residence in the cells, when the temperature is 

 favorable, is something more than two weeks. In 

 this short time, and by these physical differences in 

 the kind of food and cells, are developed, from eggs 



