Bees, as well as ants, are often seen to meet and cross their antennæ, and they then proceed to act as if important information was thus imparted. When the queen of a hive is lost, the intelligence is spread with such rapidity that twenty thousand bees are informed of the fact in the space of a few hours,—a circumstance to be explained only by the supposition of something like language, in use among them.
The lives of most insects are extremely brief. Some live but a few hours; others for a few days, or weeks, or months. By far the larger portion begin and end their existence in the course of the warm season. The drones or male bees are cut off by violence, as we have seen, after having lived three or four months. The average life of the working bee is about six months, though they sometimes live to the age of ten or twelve months.
The queen is a more favored being. She is not only the mother of thousands, but she survives, while many generations pass away. Her life is often extended to the period of four or five years.
What is Habit?
When we have done a thing several times, it becomes easier for us to do it than before. When a boy begins to use profane words, he does it with a feeling of awkwardness. The first time he swears, he usually feels quite badly.
But he swears the second time more easily, and more easily still the third time. At last he does it without any bad feeling, and, indeed, takes a pleasure in his profanity. He has now got a habit of swearing, and it is easier for him to use bad language than any other.
It is just the same with lying. A child feels very badly when he tells the first lie. He feels badly, too, when he tells the second; but when he has told a dozen or two, he usually tells a lie as easily as he tells the truth; and the reason is that he has got a habit of lying.
Habit is, then, a disposition, an inclination to do a thing, arising from practice. It is said that practice makes perfect; by which it is meant that a person does a thing easily which he has done often.
Now some very important inferences are to be drawn from this. If a person does evil repeatedly, he gets a habit of it, and it becomes natural, easy for him to do evil; and the longer a person goes on in this habit, the more easy it is for him to do evil, and the more difficult to do well. What a fearful thing it is, therefore, to get any bad habit!