556 INSTINCT OF INSECTS. 
proceed to the third head, under which I proposed to consider the instincts 
of insects — that of their extraordinary development. 
The development of some of the instincts of the larger animals, such as 
those of sex, is well known to depend upon their age and the peculiar 
state of the bodily organs ; and to this, as before observed, the succession 
of different instincts in the same insect, in its larva and perfect state, is 
closely analogous. But what I have now in view is that ewtraordinary de- 
velopment of instinct which is dependent not upon the age or any change 
in the organisation of the animal, but upon external events — which in in- 
dividuals of the same species, age, and structure, in some circumstances 
slumbers unmoved, but may in others be excited to the most singular and 
unlooked-for action. In illustrating this property of instinct, which, as 
far as I am aware, is not known to occur i: any of the larger animals, I 
shall confine myself as before to the hive-bee; the only insect, indeed, 
in which its existence has been satisfactorily ascertained, though it is 
highly probable that other species living in societies may exhibit the same 
phenomenon. 
Several of the facts occurring in the history of bees might be referred to 
this head; but I shall here advert only to the treatment of the drones by 
the workers under different circumstances, and to the operations of the 
latter consequent upon the irretrievable loss of the:queen — facts which 
have been before stated to you, but to the principal features of which my 
present argument makes it necessary that I should again direct your 
attention. 
If a hive of bees be this year in possession of a queen duly fertilised, 
and consequently sure the next season of a succession of males, all the drones, 
as I have before stated, towards the approach of winter are massacred by 
the workers with the most unrelenting ferocity. ‘To this seemingly cruel 
course they are doubtless impelled by an imperious instinct ; and as it 
is regularly followed in every hive thus cireumstanced, it would seem at the 
first view to be an impulse as intimately connected with the organisation 
and very existence of the workers, andas incapable of change, as that 
which leads them to build cells or to store up honey. But this is far from 
being the case. However certain the doom of the drones this autumn if the 
hive be furnished with a duly fertilised queen, their undisturbed existence 
over the winter is equally sure if the hive have lost its sovereign, or her 
impregnation have been so retarded as to make a succession of males in 
the spring doubtful. In such a hive the workers do not destroy a 
engl drone, though the hottest persecution rages in all the hives around 
them. 
Now, how are we to explain this difference of conduct? Are we 
to suppose that the bees know and reason upon this alteration in the cir- 
cumstances of their community — that they infer the possibility of their 
entire extinction if the whole male stock were destroyed when without a 
queen — and that thus influenced by a wise policy they restrain the fury 
they would otherwise have exercised? This would be at once to make 
them not only gifted with reason, but endowed with a power of looking 
before and after, and a command over the strongest natural propensities, 
superior to what could be expected in a similar case even from a society 
of men, and is obviously unwarrantable. The only probable suppo~ 
sition is, clearly, that a new instinct is developed suited to the extraore 
. 
