An Introduction to Entomology: Vol. 2 / or Elements of the Natural History of the Insects

by William Kirby; William Spence

Now, how are we to explain this difference of conduct? Are we to suppose that the bees know and reason upon this alteration in the circumstances of their community—that they infer the possibility of their entire extinction if the whole male stock were destroyed when without a queen—and that thus influenced by a wise policy they restrain the fury they would otherwise have exercised? This would be at once to make them not only gifted with reason, but endowed with a power of looking before and after, and a command over the strongest natural propensities, superior to what could be expected in a similar case even from a society of men; and is obviously unwarrantable. The only probable supposition is, clearly, that a new instinct is developed suited to the extraordinary situation in which the community stands, leading them now to regard with kindness the drones, for whom otherwise they would have felt the most violent aversion.

In this instance, indeed, it would perhaps be more strictly correct to say (which, however, is equally wonderful) that the old instinct was extinguished; but in the case of the loss of a queen, to which I am next to advert, which is followed by positive operations, the extraordinary development of a new and peculiar instinct is indisputable.

In a hive which no untoward event has deprived of its queen, the workers take no other active steps in the education of her successors—those of which one is to occupy her place when she has flown off at the head of a new swarm in spring—than to prepare a certain number of cells of extraordinary capacity for their reception while in the egg, and to feed them when become grubs with a peculiar food until they have attained maturity. This, therefore, is their ordinary instinct; and it may happen that the workers of a hive may have no necessity for a long series of successive generations to exercise any other. But suppose them to lose their queen. Far from sinking into that inactive despair which was formerly attributed to them, after the commotion which the rapidly-circulated news of their calamity gave birth to has subsided, they betake themselves with an alacrity from which man when under misfortune might deign to take a lesson, to the active reparation of their loss. Several ordinary cells, as was before related at large[803], are without delay pulled down, and converted into a variable number of royal cells capacious enough for the education of one or more queen-grubs selected out of the unhoused working grubs—which in this pressing emergency are mercilessly sacrificed—and fed with the appropriate royal food to maturity. Thus sure of once more acquiring a head, the hive return to their ordinary labours, and in about sixteen days one or more queens are produced; one of which, after being indebted to fortune for an elevation as singular as that of Catherine the First of Russia, steps into day and assumes the reins of state.

To this remarkable deviation from the usual procedures of the community, the observations above made in the case of the drones must be applied. We cannot account for it by conceiving the working bees to be acquainted with the end which their operations have in view. If we suppose them to know that the queen and working-grubs are originally the same, and that to convert one of the latter into the former it is only necessary to transfer it to an apartment sufficiently spacious and to feed it with a peculiar food, we confer upon them a depth of reason to which Prometheus, when he made his clay man, had no pretensions—an original discovery, in short, to which man has but just attained after some thousand years of painful research, having escaped all the observers of bees from Aristomachus, to Swammerdam and Reaumur of modern times. We have no other alternative, then, but to refer this phenomenon to the extraordinary development of a new instinct suited for the exigency, however incomprehensible to us the manner of its excitement may appear.

II. Such, then, are the exquisiteness, the number, and the extraordinary development of the instincts of insects. But is instinct the sole guide of their actions? Are they in every case the blind agents of irresistible impulse? These queries, I have already hinted, cannot in my opinion be replied to in the affirmative; and I now proceed to show, that though instinct is the chief guide of insects, they are endowed also with no inconsiderable portion of reason.

Some share of reason is denied by few philosophers of the present day to the larger animals. But its existence has not generally (except by those who reject instinct altogether) been recognised in insects: probably on the ground that, as the proportions of reason and of instinct seem to co-exist in an inverse ratio, the former might be expected to be extinct in a class in which the latter is found in such perfection. This rule, however, though it may hold good in man, whose instincts are so few and imperfect, and whose reason is so pre-eminent, is far from being confirmed by an extended survey of the classes of animals generally. Many quadrupeds, birds, and fishes, with instincts apparently not very acute, do not seem to have their place supplied by a proportionably superior share of reason: and insects, as I think the facts I have to adduce will prove, though ranking so low in the scale of creation, seem to enjoy as great a degree of reason as many animals of the superior classes, yet in combination with instincts much more numerous and exquisite.

I must premise, however, that in so perplexed and intricate a field, I am sensible how necessary it is to tread with caution. A far greater collection of facts must be made, and the science of metaphysics generally be placed on a more solid foundation than it now can boast, before we can pretend to decide, in numerous cases, which of the actions of insects are to be deemed purely instinctive, and which the result of reason. What I advance, therefore, on this head, I wish to be regarded rather as conjectures, that, after the best consideration I am able to give to a subject so much beyond my depth, seem to me plausible, than as certainties to which I require your implicit assent.

That reason has nothing to do with the major part of the actions of insects is clear, as I have before observed, from the determinateness and perfection of these actions, and from their being performed independently of instruction and experience. A young bee (I must once more repeat) betakes itself to the complex operation of building cells, with as much skill as the oldest of its compatriots. We cannot suppose that it has any knowledge of the purposes for which the cells are destined; or of the effects that will result from its feeding the young larvæ, and the like. And if an individual bee be thus destitute of the very materials of reasoning as to its main operations, so must the society in general.

Nor in those remarkable deviations and accommodations to circumstances, instanced under a former head, can we, for considerations there assigned, suppose insects to be influenced by reason. These deviations are still limited in number, and involve acts far too complex and recondite to spring from any process of ratiocination in an animal whose term of life does not exceed two years.