62 PROLEGOMENA 



Queen, drones, and workers have each their allotted 

 sufficiency of food; each performs the function assigned 

 to it in the economy of the hive, and all contribute to 

 the success of the whole cooperative society in its com- 

 petition with rival collectors of nectar and pollen and 

 with other enemies, in the state of nature without. In 

 the same sense as the garden, or a colony, is a work 

 of human art, the bee polity is a work of apiarian art, 

 brought about by the cosmic process, working through 

 the organization of the hymenopterous type. 



Now this society is the direct product of an organic 

 necessity, impelling every member of it to a course of 

 action which tends to the good of the whole. Each 

 bee has its duty and none has any rights. Whether 

 bees are susceptible of feeling and capable of 

 thought is a question which cannot be dogmatically 

 answered. As a pious opinion, I am disposed to 

 deny them more than the merest rudiments of 

 consciousness. 15 But it is curious to reflect that a 

 thoughtful drone (workers and queens would have no 

 leisure for speculation) with a turn for ethical philos- 

 ophy, must needs profess himself an intuitive moralist 

 of the purest water. He would point out, with perfect 

 justice, that the devotion of the workers to a life of 

 ceaseless toil for a mere subsistence wage, cannot be 

 accounted for either by enlightened selfishness, or by 

 any other sort of utilitarian motives; since these bees 

 begin to work, without experience or reflection, as they 

 emerge from the cell in which they are hatched. Plainly, 

 an eternal and immutable principle, innate in each bee, 

 can alone account for the phenomena. On the other 

 hand, the biologist, who traces out all the extant stages 

 of gradation between solitary and hive bees, as clearly 



15 Collected Essays, vol. i., "Animal Automatism"; vol. v., 

 "Prologue," pp. 45 et seq. [T. H. H.] 



