THE STORING INSTINCT 185 
is consumed. In this there is, indeed, only the first 
stage of storing, but the late M. Henri Fabre de- 
scribed in his inimitable way how the mother 
scatabee molds a pear-shaped mass and deposits 
at the narrow end an egg which occupies a special 
hatching chamber and has beside it a special first 
meal for the emerging grub! Here it is not difficult 
to imagine the step from collecting for self to collect- 
ing for others, and a great interest is attached to 
Fabre’s observations of the Spanish Copris and some 
related dung-beetles which are unique among non- 
social insects, inasmuch as the mother survives to 
see the emergence and complete metamorphosis 
of the family (a very small one) for whose early 
sustenance she has industriously stored. It seems 
to us reasonable to suppose that this represents an 
old-fashioned state of affairs, and that the ordinary 
occurrence (that the mother, among the higher 
orders of insects, does not survive to see her young 
in the perfect state) is a secondary punctuation of 
the life-history. 
There is an evolutionist gratification in studying 
the storing activities of bees, for they are exhibited 
in such varied degrees of elaboration by different 
types. Among the solitary bees the mother makes a 
store for the brood which she never survives to see; 
among humble-bees the store is begun by the 
mother but continued by her worker-children, 
and there are species (beyond British bounds) in 
which at least a part of the society survives the 
winter: in tropical species of the bees generically 
