Beyond this stage of perfection in structure, natural selection couldn’t lead; for the comb of the hive-bee, so far as we can see, is completely good in economising labour and wax. It was really curious to note in circumstances of difficulty, as when two pieces of comb met at an angle, how usually the bees would pull down and rebuild in alternative ways the same cell, sometimes recurring to a shape which they’d at first rejected. The work of building seems to be a form of steadiness struck between many bees, all instinctively standing at the identical relative distance from each other, all making an attempt to sweep equal spheres, and then building up, or leaving ungnawed, the planes of intersection between these spheres. Thus, as I imagine, probably the most fantastic of all known instincts, that of the hive-bee, will be defined by natural selection having taken benefit of quite a few, successive, slight modifications of easier instincts; natural choice having, by slow degrees, more and more completely led the bees to sweep equal spheres at a given distance from one another in a double layer, and to build up and excavate the wax along the planes of intersection. Now what particular issue would there be in natural selection preserving all of the slight individual variations within the form of the beak, which had been higher and better adapted to break open the seeds, until a beak was formed, as nicely constructed for this goal as that of the nuthatch, at the identical time that behavior, or compulsion, or spontaneous variations of taste, led the fowl to grow to be an increasing number of of a seed-eater?
But allow us to suppose that this latter circumstance decided, because it probably typically has decided, whether or not a bee allied to our humble-bees may exist in giant numbers in any nation; and allow us to additional suppose that the group lived by means of the winter, and consequently required a retailer of honey: there can in this case be little question that it would be an advantage to our imaginary humble-bee if a slight modification of her instincts led her to make her waxen cells near collectively, in order to intersect a little bit; for a wall in frequent even to two adjoining cells would save some little labour and wax. It typically occurs that the bigger or the smaller sized employees are the most numerous; or that both large and small are quite a few, while these of an intermediate size are scanty in numbers. Having carefully dissected a number of specimens of these staff, I can affirm that the eyes are way more rudimentary in the smaller staff than will be accounted for merely by their proportionately lesser dimension; and i fully imagine, although I dare not assert so positively, that the staff of intermediate measurement have their ocelli in an precisely intermediate situation. Formica flava has larger and smaller staff, with some few of intermediate dimension; and, on this species, as Mr. F. Smith has noticed, the bigger workers have simple eyes (ocelli), which, though small, can be plainly distinguished, whereas the smaller employees have their ocelli rudimentary.
Mr. F. Smith has proven that the neuters of several British ants differ surprisingly from each other in size and sometimes in colour; and that the extreme varieties may be linked together by individuals taken out of the same nest: I’ve myself in contrast good gradations of this sort. This process must have been repeated many instances, until that prodigious quantity of difference between the fertile and sterile females of the same species has been produced which we see in lots of social insects. What is finished to the animal after it’s dead makes no difference to the state of the animal. As far as intuition alone is anxious, the fantastic distinction on this respect between the staff and the proper females would have been better exemplified by the hive-bee. It has been objected to the foregoing view of the origin of instincts that “the variations of construction and of intuition will need to have been simultaneous and accurately adjusted to each other, as a modification within the one with out a right away corresponding change in the other would have been fatal.” The power of this objection rests entirely on the assumption that the adjustments within the instincts and construction are abrupt. To take one more case: few instincts are more exceptional than that which leads the swift of the Eastern Islands to make its nest wholly of inspissated saliva.
Some birds build their nests of mud, believed to be moistened with saliva; and one of many swifts of North America makes its nest (as I’ve seen) of sticks agglutinated with saliva, and even with flakes of this substance. Such religion could also be positioned in the facility of selection that a breed of cattle, all the time yielding oxen with extraordinarily long horns, may, it’s possible, be formed by fastidiously watching which individual bulls and cows, when matched, produced oxen with the longest horns; and yet no one ox would ever have propagated its sort. The bees, after all, no more realizing that they swept their spheres at one explicit distance from each other, than they know what are the a number of angles of the hexagonal prisms and of the basal rhombic plates; the motive power of the strategy of pure selection having been the development of cells of due strength and of the proper measurement and shape for the larvæ, this being effected with the best possible economic system of labour and wax; that individual swarm which thus made the perfect cells with least labour, and least waste of honey within the secretion of wax, having succeeded finest, and having transmitted their newly-acquired economical instincts to new swarms, which of their flip could have had the most effective probability of succeeding within the battle for existence.