INSTINCT OF INSECTS. 557 
dinary situation in which the community stands, leading them now to 
regard with kindness the drones, for whom otherwise they would have felt 
the most violent aversion, 
In this instance, indeed, it would perhaps be more strictly correct to say 
(which, however, is equally wonderful) that the old instinct was extin- 
guished ; but in the case of the loss of a queen, to which I am next to 
advert, which is followed by positive operations, the extraordinary develop 
ment of a new and peculiar instinct is indisputable. 
In a hive which no untoward event has deprived of its queen; the 
workers take no other active steps in the education of her successors — 
those of which one is to occupy her place when she has flown off at the 
head of a new swarm in spring —than to prepare a certain number of 
cells of extraordinary capacity for their reception while in the egg, and 
to feed them when become grubs with a peculiar food until they have at- 
tained maturity. This, therefore, is their ordinary instinct ; and it may 
happen that the workers of a hive may have no necessity for a long series 
of successive generations to exercise any other. But suppose them to lose 
their queen. Far from sinking into that inactive despair which was for- 
merly attributed to them, after the commotion which the rapidly-circulated 
news of their calamity gave birth to has subsided, they betake themselves 
with an alacrity from which man when under misfortune might deign to take 
a lesson, to the active reparation of their loss. Several ordinary cells, as was 
before related at large, are without delay pulled down, and converted into 
a variable number of royal cells, capacious enough for the education of one 
or more queen-grubs selected out of the unhoused working grubs — which 
in this pressing emergency are mercilessly sacrificed — and fed with the ap- 
ropriate royal food to maturity. Thus sure of once more acquiring a 
ead, the hive return to their ordinary labours, and in about sixteen days 
one or more queens are produced ; one of which, after being indebted to 
fortune for an elevation as singular as that of Catherine the First of 
Russia, steps into day and assumes the reins-of state. 
To this remarkable deviation from the usual procedures of the commu- 
nity, the observations above made in the case of the drones must be 
applied. We cannot account for it by conceiving the working-bees to be 
acquainted with the end which their operations have in view. If we sup- 
pose them to /now that the queen and working-grubs are originally the 
same, and that to convert one of the latter into the former it is only neces- 
sary to transfer it to an apartment sufficiently spacious and to feed it with a 
peculiar food, we confer upon them a depth of reason to which Prome- 
theus, when he made his clay man, had no pretensions—an original dis- 
covery, in short, to which man has but just attained after some thousand 
years of painful research, having escaped all the observers of bees from 
Aristomachus to Swammerdam and Reaumur of modern times. We have 
no other alternative, then, but to refer this phenomenon to the extraor- 
dinary development of a new instinct suited for the exigency, however in- 
comprehensible to us the manner of its excitement may appear. 
II. Such, then, are the exquisiteness, the number, and the extraordinary 
development of the instincts of insects. But is instinct the sole guide of 
their actions? Are they in every case the blind agents of irresistible im- 
pulse? These queries, I have already hinted, cannot in my opinion be 
replied to in the affirmative; and I now proceed to show that though in- 
