KIRBY S HYPOTHESIS. 33 



witness the massacre of a working bee by the members of 

 its own community, on the ground of its superannuation ? 

 Nothing can be more directly contrary to the general prin- 

 ciple of action, which is established amongst them. A bee 

 will kill a stranger bee, who attempts to force his way into 

 the hive ; but, it cannot have escaped the observation of every 

 scientific keeper of bees, that there appear to exist, through- 

 out their whole community, an affection and attachment for 

 each other, which are not to be found in any other society 

 of insects. 



If Kirby, instead of his conjectures as to the character 

 and ultimate destination of these black bees, had denied 

 their existence in toto, or treated them as one of the extra- 

 vagances of Huber's fancy, he would have given us some 

 reason to suppose, that he was guided by the power of his 

 own experience, when he compiled his history of the bee in 

 his introduction to entomology ; he, however, fully agrees 

 with Huber in their existence, but differs from him in the cause 

 of their destruction. In justice to Kirby it must, however, 

 be stated, that he stands not alone in his opinion, for he is 

 propped up in his hypothesis by the editor of the Insect Archi- 

 tecture, who says, " that the very great number of these black 

 bees, which sometimes appear, does not well accord with the 

 opinion of Kirby and Spence." Without attempting to dis- 

 perse the obscurity of this passage, we shall briefly remark, 

 that of the two hypotheses of Huber and Kirby, we should 

 be inclined to give the preference to that of the latter entomo- 

 logist, for there is something more plausible and less object- 

 ionable in the massacre of a few useless, superannuated 

 members of the hive, than that, according to Huber, like the 

 ephemera, they should be born to a mere diurnal existence, 

 endowed with no property of utility, and doomed to be 

 starved to death by the community at large. 



In opposition, however, to the experience of the most cele- 

 brated apiarians of the present day, native and foreign, Mr. 



