They certainly exercise a will, evinced by their power of discrimination, which decides what is salutary and what is noxious; and the passions are exemplified in their revenge, their sexual love, and their affection for their offspring, the latter being exhibited in their unremitting labour and careful provision for them, although they are never to see them. If there be any precedence in the order of the relative quality and distinction of the bees, it will be shown in the degree of superiority with which this function is accomplished. The perfection of this function we see progressively maturing as it passes onwards from the merely burrowing-bee to the more complicated processes of the masons, carpenters, and upholsterers,—all solitary insects, and working each individually and separately to the accomplishment of its object. But we may certainly inquire where we shall intercalate the sagacity of the cuckoo-bees. A vast bound is immediately made from the artisan bees to the social bees with three sexes, which, as first shown in the humble-bee, works in small and rude communities, with dwellings of irregular construction. The next and most perfect grade is the metropolitan polity, accomplished architecture, laborious parsimony, indomitable perseverance, and well-organized subordination of the involuntary friend of man, the domestic bee. This insect has furnished Scriptural figures of exquisite sweetness, poetry with pleasing metaphors, morality with aphorisms, and the most elegant of the Latin poets with the subject of the supremest of his perfect Georgics.
That bees feel pain may be assumed from the evidence we have of their feeling pleasure, although instances are on record of insects surviving for months impaled; and they lose a limb, or even an antenna, without evincing much suffering, and I have seen a humble-bee crawling along on the ground with its abdomen entirely torn away.
In speaking of the antennæ above, as possibly the organs of hearing, I would wish to add, that they evidently possess some complex function, of which, not possessing any analogy, we cannot certainly conceive any notion. They are observed to be used as instruments of touch, and that too of the nicest discrimination. They seem to be extremely sensitive to the vibrations of sound and the undulations of air, and keenly appreciative of atmospheric influences, of heat, of cold, and of electrical agitations. That they are important media in sexual communication must be assumed from their great differences of structure and size in the sexes, probably both as organs of scent and stimulation. I have often observed bees thrust their antennæ into flowers, one at the time, before they have entered the flower themselves, and in some insects, as in the Ichneumons, they are constantly in a state of vibration,—a tribe which, although of the same order, are remote in position from the bees, yet they may be instructively referred to by way of analogy in the discussion of the uses of an organ, whose functions so clearly follow its structure and position in the organization of the entire class of insects, that the analogy might be safely assumed in application to every family of the class, if observation could only correctly ascertain its uses in any one of them.
That it is of primary signification to the bees, is sufficiently shown by nature having furnished these insects with an apparatus designed solely to keep the antennæ clean, and which I have described above, when speaking of the structure of the anterior leg.
In the social tribes the antennæ are used as means of communication. The social ants, bees, and wasps may be often seen striking each other’s antennæ, and then they will each be observed to go off in directions different from that which they were pursuing. An extraordinary instance of this mode of communication once came under my own notice, having been called to observe it. There was a dead cricket in my kitchen, another issued from its hole, and in its ramblings came across this dead one; after walking round, and examining it with its antennæ and fore legs a short time, it started off. Shortly, either attracted by sound, or meeting it by accident, it came across a fellow; they plied their antennæ together, and the result was that both returned to their dead companion, and dragged him away to their burrowing-place,—an extraordinary instance of intercommunication which I can vouch for.
It would be curious to know if the means of communication thus evidently possessed by animals, extends beyond the social and gregarious tribes, and whether the faculty undergoes any change through differences of climate and locality, as man has done in the lapse of time. For man, notwithstanding the vastly divergent differences of race, may be obscurely tracked through the dim trail of the affiliation of languages to one common origin. But the complete identity of habit throughout the world of those genera which are native with us, would seem to affirm that they are as closely allied in every other particular, were we in a condition to make the investigation, and whence we may conclusively assume that they all had one central commencement.
That this mode of communication, and this exercise of the organ in the solitary tribes is limited to the season of their amours is very probable, and I apprehend that it is not exercised between individuals of distinct species. But that, at that period, their action is intensified may be presumed from the then greater activity of the males, who seem to have been called into existence only to fulfil that great object of nature, and which she associates invariably with gratification and pleasure. Even in plants it may be observed to be attended with something very analogous to animal enjoyment in the peculiar development at that period of an excessively energetic propulsion, which is the nearest approach the vegetable kingdom makes to the higher phase of sensiferous life.
The clothing and colouring of bees are very various, but the gayest are the parasites, red and yellow, with their various tints, and white and cream-colour decorate them. The ordinary colour is deep brown, or chestnut, or black. Where the pubescence is not dense, they are often deeply punctured, and exhibit many metallic tinges. Many are thickly clothed with long hair, and this, especially in the Bombi and Apathi, is sometimes of bright gay colour, yellow, red, white, of a rich brown, or an intense black, sometimes in bands of different tints upon the same insect, and sometimes of one uniform hue.