322 
BRITISH BEES. 
of its ingenuity and skill, its significant name being 
everywhere analogous. 
The habits and economy of these industrious little 
creatures have been a source of greater wonder and 
admiration the more closely and accurately they have 
been observed. They have attracted the thoughtful spe¬ 
culation of minds of the largest compass throughout 
all ages, which, reasoning upon the modus operandi of 
these insects, have endeavoured to define, and determine 
the differences between instinct and reason, with their 
precise limitations. But baffled in their attempt to 
settle whether these be affinities or analogies, it should 
rather have persuaded them to adopt the motto of 
Montaigne, and exclaim, Que sais-je ? Into these meta¬ 
physical discussions it is not necessary to enter, and I 
confine myself to the natural history of the insect. 
Although the description of the three sexes which 
comprise the population of the hive are technically given 
above with scientific precision, it will be as well, perhaps, 
to recapitulate them briefly, with their distinctive attri¬ 
butes, in a more popular form. 
They consist of a queen, or productive female, whose 
function is thought to be exclusively to lay eggs, but who 
may perhaps have some hitherto undiscovered control 
over the executive of the hive, to be implied by the con¬ 
fusion invariably following her death or her removal 
from the community, and which becomes totally destruc¬ 
tive to its organic constituency unless stayed by another 
monarch being improvised, or by one extraneously sup¬ 
plied; one monarch alone rules without a coadjutor, 
and without any equal being tolerated, for the presence 
of a second queen, or the immature larva of one, even of 
her own progeny, maddens her to murderous aggression, 
