Bees, wasps, ants, gall flies, saw flies, and ichneumon flies are Hymenoptera, the ants coming into this membranous winged order because the males and females are winged for the marriage flight, and lose them only after this is over.
This is considered the highest order of insects because it contains members with the most marvelously developed instincts of any creatures in the world, insects whose habits, skill and industry excite our admiration and wonder. Whether they live in colonies with highly developed social states, or whether they live the lives of solitary hermits, their industry and sacrifice to keep alive and perpetuate their kind, are things that make us wonder whether, after all, we have the right to call ourselves the most altruistic of living creatures.
It is around these Hymenoptera that centers the great question of what instinct is, and how it differs from intelligence. We cannot help but feel that it is memory of some kind, not necessarily like the memory of our own brains, but a race memory, transmitted in the almost microscopic egg laid by the mother before she dies.
The instinct of the bee, or wasp, or ant is quite a different kind of thing from reason. Since these creatures have stood still in their development, or at least have changed but little since tertiary times, it is quite possible that their present state represents the highest type of evolution along the lines of instinct. The power to reason, to meet a new emergency, are things which came much later in the development of the world, and man, the creature having them in the highest degree, seems destined to control all other creatures in the end.
THE PORTRAIT OF A BALD-FACED HORNET
(Vespula maculata, Linn.)
I wish I could convey to you my sensation when, in hunting for the focus on my ground glass, this creature burst upon my sight. It was as though, exploring in some strange land, I suddenly stood face to face with a beast about which no schoolbook had ever taught me anything. It peered at me out of the gloom of imperfect focus, and it took me some time to realize that I was looking into the eyes of a bald-faced hornet.