concerned. By one they are led to extract honey from the nectaries
of flowers; by another to collect pollen after a process involving
very complicated manipulations, and requiring a singular apparatus of
brushes and baskets; and that must surely be considered a third, which
so remarkably and beneficially restricts each gathering to the same
plant[796]. It is clearly a distinct instinct which inspires bees with
such dread of rain, that even if a cloud pass before the sun, they
return to the hive in the greatest haste[797]; and that seems to me
not less so, which teaches them to find their way back to their home
after the most distant and intricate wanderings. When bees have found
the direction in which their hive lies, Huber says they fly to it with
an extreme rapidity, and as straight as a ball from a musket[798]:
and if their hives were always in open situations, one might suppose,
as Huber seems inclined to think, that it is by their sight they are
conducted to them. But hives are frequently found in small gardens
embowered in wood; and in the midst of villages surrounded and
interspersed with trees and buildings, so as to make it impossible
that they can be seen from a distance. If you had been with me in
1815, in the famous Pays de Waes in Flanders--where the country is a
perfect flat, and the inhabitants so enamoured either of the beauty
or profit of trees, that their fields, which are rarely above three
acres in extent, are _constantly_ surrounded with a double row, making
the whole district one vast wood--you would have pitied the poor bees
if reduced to depend on their own eye-sight for retracing the road
homeward. In vain during my stay at St. Nicholas I sallied out at every
outlet to try to gain some idea of the extent and form of the town.
Trees--trees--trees--still met me, and intercepted the view in every
direction; and I defy any inhabitant bee of this rural metropolis,
after once quitting its hive, ever to gain a glimpse of it again until
nearly perpendicularly over it. The bees, therefore, of the Pays de
Waes, and consequently all other bees, must be led to their abodes by
instinct, as certainly as it is instinct that directs the migrations of
birds or of fishes, or domestic quadrupeds to find out their homes from
inconceivable distances[799].--When they have reached the hive, another
instinct leads them to regurgitate into the extended proboscis of their
hungry companions who have been occupied at home, a portion of the
honey collected in the fields; and another directs them to unload their
legs of the masses of pollen, and to store it in the cells for future
use.
Several distinct instincts, again, are called into action in the
important business of feeding the young brood. One teaches them to
swallow pollen, not to satisfy the calls of hunger, but that it may
undergo in their stomach an elaboration fitting it for the food of
the grubs; and another to regurgitate it when duly concocted, and to
administer it to their charge, proportioning the supply to the age
and condition of the recipients. A third informs them when the young
grubs have attained their full growth, and directs them to cover
their cells with a waxen lid, convex in the male cells, but nearly
flat in those of workers; and by a fourth, as soon as the young bees
have burst into day, they are impelled to clean out the deserted
tenements and to make them ready for new occupants.
Numerous as are the instincts I have already enumerated, the list must
yet include those connected with that mysterious principle which binds
the working bees of a hive to their queen:--the singular imprisonment
in which they retain the young queens that are to lead off a swarm,
until their wings be sufficiently expanded to enable them to fly the
moment they are at liberty, gradually paring away the waxen wall that
confines them to their cell to an extreme thinness, and only suffering
it to be broken down at the precise moment required;--the attention
with which, in these circumstances, they feed the imprisoned queen by
frequently putting honey upon her proboscis, protruded from a small
orifice in the lid of her cell;--the watchfulness with which, when at
the period of swarming more queens than one are required, they place a
guard over the cells of those undisclosed, to preserve them from the
jealous fury of their excluded rivals;--the exquisite calculation with
which they invariably release the _oldest_ queens the first from their
confinement;--the singular love of monarchical dominion, by which, when
two queens in other circumstances are produced, they are led to impel
them to combat until one is destroyed;--the ardent devotion which binds
them to the fate and fortunes of the survivor;--the distraction which
they manifest at her loss, and their resolute determination not to
accept of any stranger until an interval has elapsed sufficiently long
to allow of no chance of the return of their rightful sovereign;--and
(to omit a further enumeration) the obedience which in the utmost noise
and confusion they show to her well-known hum.
I have now instanced at least thirty distinct instincts with which
every individual of the nurses amongst the working-bees is endowed:
and if to the account be added their care to carry from the hive
the dead bodies of any of the community; their pertinacity in their
battles, in directing their sting at those parts only of the bodies
of their adversaries which are penetrable by it; their annual
autumnal murder of the drones, &c. &c.--it is certain that this
number might be very considerably increased, perhaps doubled.
At the first view you will be inclined to suspect some fallacy in
this enumeration, and that this variety of actions ought to be
referred rather to some general principle, capable of accommodating
itself to different circumstances, than to so many different kinds of
instinct. But to what principle? Not to reason, the faculty to which
we assign this power of varying accommodation. All the actions above
adduced come strictly under the description of instinctive actions,
being all performed by every generation of bees since the creation of
the world, and as perfectly a day or two after their birth as at any
subsequent period. And as the very essence of instinct consists in
the determinate character of the actions to which it gives birth, it
is clear that every distinctly different action must be referred to a
distinct instinct. Few will dispute that the instinct which leads a
duck to resort to the water is a different instinct from that which
leads her to sit upon her eggs; for the hen though endowed with one
is not with the other. In fact, they are as distinct and unconnected
as the senses of sight and smell; and it appears to me that it would
be as contrary to philosophical accuracy of language, in the former
case to call the two instincts modifications of each other, as in the
latter so to designate the two senses; and as we say that a deaf and
blind man has fewer senses than other men, so (strictly) we ought not
to speak of instinct as one faculty (though to avoid circumlocution
I have myself often employed this common mode of expression), or
say that one insect has a greater or less share of instinct than
another, but more or fewer _instincts_.--That it is not always easy
to determine what actions are to be referred to a distinct instinct
and what to a modification of an instinct, I am very ready to
admit; but this is no solid ground for regarding all instincts as
modifications of some one principle. It is often equally difficult to
fix the limits between instinct and reason; but we are not on this
account justified in deeming them the same.
This multitude of instincts in the same individual, becomes more
wonderful when considered in another point of view. Were they
constantly to follow each other in regular sequence, so that each
bee necessarily first began to build cells, then to collect honey,
next pollen, and so on, we might plausibly enough refer them to some
change in the sensations of the animal, caused by alterations in the
structure and gradual development of its organs, in the same way as
on similar principles we explain the sexual instincts of the superior
tribes. But it is certain that no such consecutive series prevails.
The different instincts of the bee are called into action in an order
regulated solely by the needs of the society. If combs be wanted,
no bee collects honey for storing until they are provided[800]: and
if, when constructed, any accident injure or destroy them, every
labour is suspended until the mischief is repaired or new ones
substituted[801]. When the crevices round the hive are effectually
secured with propolis, the instinct directing the collection of this
substance lies dormant: but transfer the bees to a new hive which
shall require a new luting, and it is instantly re-excited. But these
instances are superfluous. Every one knows that at the same moment
of time the citizens of a hive are employed in the most varied and
opposite operations. Some are collecting pollen; others are in search
of honey; some busied at home in the first construction of the cells;
others in giving them their last polish; others in ventilating the
hive; others again in feeding the young brood and the like.
Now, how are we to account for this regularity of procedure--this
undeviating accuracy with which the precise instinct wanted is
excited--this total absence of all confusion in the employment by
each inhabitant of the hive, of that particular instinct out of so
many which the good of the community requires? No thinking man ever
witnesses the complexness and yet regularity and efficiency of a
great establishment, such as the Bank of England, or the Post-office,
without marvelling that even human reason can put together with so
little friction and such slight deviations from correctness, machines
whose wheels are composed not of wood and iron, but of fickle mortals
of a thousand different inclinations, powers, and capacities. But if
such establishments be surprising even with reason for their prime
mover, how much more so is a hive of bees whose proceedings are
guided by their instincts alone! We can conceive that the sensations
of hunger experienced on awaking in the morning should excite into
action their instinct of gathering honey. But all are hungry: yet all
do not rush out in search of flowers. What _sensation_ is it that
_detains_ a portion of the hive at home, unmindful of the gnawings
of an empty stomach, busied in domestic arrangements, until the
return of their roving companions? Of those that fly abroad, what
conception can we form of the cause which, while one set is gathering
honey or pollen, leads another company to load their legs with
pellets of propolis? Are we to say that the instinct of the former
is excited by one sensation, that of the latter by another? But why
should one sensation predominate in one set of bees, while another
takes the lead in a second?--or how is it that these different
instincts are called up precisely in the degree which the actual
and changing state of things in the hive requires?--Of those which
remain at home, what is it that determines in one party the instinct
of building cells to prevail; in another that of ventilating the
hive; in a third that of feeding the young brood? For my own part,
I confess that the more I reflect on this subject, and contrast the
diversity of the means with the regularity and uniformity of the
end, the more I am lost in astonishment. The effects of instinct
seem even more wonderful than those of reason, in the same manner
as the consentaneous movements of a mighty and divided army, which,
though under the command of twenty generals and from the most distant
quarters, should meet at the assigned spot at the very hour fixed
upon, would be more surprising than the steam-moved operations,
however complex, of one of Boulton's mints.
For the sake of distinctness and compression, I have confined myself
in considering the number of the instincts of individual insects to
a single species, the bee; but if the history of other societies
of these animals--wasps, ants, &c. detailed in my former letters,
be duly weighed, it will be seen that they furnish examples of the
variety in question fully as striking. These corroborating proofs I
shall leave to your own inference, and proceed to the third head,
under which I proposed to consider the instincts of insects--that of
their extraordinary development.
* * * * *
The development of some of the instincts of the larger animals, such as
those of sex, is well known to depend upon their age and the peculiar
state of the bodily organs; and to this, as before observed, the
succession of different instincts in the same insect, in its larva and
perfect state, is closely analogous. But what I have now in view is
that _extraordinary development_ of instinct, which is dependent not
upon the age or any change in the organization of the animal, but upon
external events--which in individuals of the _same_ species, age, and
structure, in some circumstances slumbers unmoved, but may in others be
excited to the most singular and unlooked-for action. In illustrating
this property of instinct, which, as far as I am aware, is not known to
occur in any of the larger animals, I shall confine myself as before to
the hive-bee; the only insect, indeed, in which its existence has been
satisfactorily ascertained, though it is highly probable that other
species living in societies may exhibit the same phenomenon.
Several of the facts occurring in the history of bees might be
referred to this head; but I shall here advert only to the treatment
of the drones by the workers under different circumstances, and to
the operations of the latter consequent upon the irretrievable loss
of the queen--facts which have been before stated to you, but to the
principal features of which my present argument makes it necessary
that I should again direct your attention.
If a hive of bees be this year in possession of a queen duly
fertilized, and consequently sure the next season of a succession
of males, all the drones, as I have before stated[802], towards
the approach of winter are massacred by the workers with the most
unrelenting ferocity. To this seemingly cruel course they are
doubtless impelled by an imperious instinct; and as it is regularly
followed in every hive thus circumstanced, it would seem at the first
view to be an impulse as intimately connected with the organization
and very existence of the workers, and as incapable of change, as
that which leads them to build cells or to store up honey. But this
is far from being the case. However certain the doom of the drones
this autumn, if the hive be furnished with a duly-fertilized queen,
their undisturbed existence over the winter is equally sure if the
hive have lost its sovereign, or her impregnation have been so
retarded as to make a succession of males in the spring doubtful. In
such a hive the workers do not destroy a single drone, though the
hottest persecution rages in all the hives around them.
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.
It does not follow, however, that reason may not have a part in
inducing some of these last-mentioned actions, though the actions
themselves are purely instinctive. I do not pretend to explain in
what way or degree they are combined; but certainly some of the facts
do not seem to admit of explanation, except on this supposition.
Thus, in the instance above cited from Huber, in which the bees
bent a comb at right angles in order to avoid a slip of glass, the
remarkable variations in the form of the cells can only, as I have
there said, be referred to instinct. Yet the original determination
to avoid the glass seems, as Huber himself observes, to indicate
something more than instinct, since glass is not a substance
against which Nature can be supposed to have forewarned bees, there
being nothing in hollow trees (their natural abodes) resembling it
either in polish or substance: and what was most striking in their
operations was, that they did not wait until they had reached the
surface of the glass before changing the direction of the comb,
but adopted this variation at a considerable distance, as though
they foresaw the inconveniences which might result from another
mode of construction[804].--However difficult it may be to form a
clear conception of this union of instinct and reason in the same
operation, or to define precisely the limits of each, instances of
these _mixed_ actions are sufficiently common among animals to leave
little doubt of the fact. It is instinct which leads a greyhound to
pursue a hare; but it must be reason that directs "an _old_ greyhound
to trust the more fatiguing part of the chase to the younger, and to
place himself so as to meet the hare in her doubles[805]."