idle for many days during the process of secretion.
A large store of honey is indispensable to support
a large stock of bees during the winter; and the security
of the hive is known mainly to depend on a large number
of bees being supported. Hence the saving of wax
by largely saving honey must be a most important element
of success in any family of bees. Of course the
success of any species of bee may be dependent on
the number of its parasites or other enemies, or on
quite distinct causes, and so be altogether independent
of the quantity of honey which the bees could collect.
But let us suppose that this latter circumstance determined,
as it probably often does determine, the numbers of
a humble-bee which could exist in a country; and let
us further suppose that the community lived throughout
the winter, and consequently required a store of honey:
there can in this case be no doubt that it would be
an advantage to our humble-bee, if a slight modification
of her instinct led her to make her waxen cells near
together, so as to intersect a little; for a wall in
common even to two adjoining cells, would save some
little wax. Hence it would continually be more
and more advantageous to our humble-bee, if she were
to make her cells more and more regular, nearer together,
and aggregated into a mass, like the cells of the
Melipona; for in this case a large part of the bounding
surface of each cell would serve to bound other cells,
and much wax would be saved. Again, from the same
cause, it would be advantageous to the Melipona, if
she were to make her cells closer together, and more
regular in every way than at present; for then, as
we have seen, the spherical surfaces would wholly
disappear, and would all be replaced by plane surfaces;
and the Melipona would make a comb as perfect as that
of the hive-bee. Beyond this stage of perfection
in architecture, natural selection could not lead;
for the comb of the hive-bee, as far as we can see,
is absolutely perfect in economising wax.
Thus, as I believe, the most wonderful of all known
instincts, that of the hive-bee, can be explained
by natural selection having taken advantage of numerous,
successive, slight modifications of simpler instincts;
natural selection having by slow degrees, more and
more perfectly, led the bees to sweep equal spheres
at a given distance from each other in a double layer,
and to build up and excavate the wax along the planes
of intersection. The bees, of course, no more
knowing that they swept their spheres at one particular
distance from each other, than they know what are
the several angles of the hexagonal prisms and of
the basal rhombic plates. The motive power of
the process of natural selection having been economy
of wax; that individual swarm which wasted least honey
in the secretion of wax, having succeeded best, and
having transmitted by inheritance its newly acquired
economical instinct to new swarms, which in their turn
will have had the best chance of succeeding in the
struggle for existence.