INSTINCT OF INSECTS. 



411 



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 

 attained 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 formerly attri- 

 buted to them, after the commotion which the rapidly-circu- 

 lated 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 un- 

 housed working-grubs — which in this pressing emergency 

 are mercilessly sacrificed — and fed with the appropriate 

 royal food to maturity. Thus sure of once more acquiring a 

 head, 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 as- 

 sumes the reins of state. 



To this remarkable deviation from the usual procedures of 

 the community 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 suppose them to 

 know that the queen and working-grubs are originally the 

 same, and that to convert one of the latter into the former it 

 is only necessary 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 Prometheus, when he made 

 his clay man, had no pretensions — an original discovery, in 



