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Here the organisation is as complete as in our hives.  There is an unique mother, there are sterile workers and males.  Certain details even seem better devised.  The males, for instance, are not wholly idle; they secrete wax.  The entrance to the hive is more carefully guarded; it has a door that can be closed when nights are cold, and when these are warm a kind of curtain will admit the air.

But the republic is less strong, general life less assured, prosperity more limited, than with our bees; and wherever these are introduced, the Meliponitae tend to disappear before them.  In both races the fraternal idea has undergone equal and magnificent development, save in one point alone, wherein it achieves no further advance among the Meliponitae than among the limited offspring of the humble-bees.  In the mechanical organisation of distributed labour, in the precise economy of effort; briefly, in the architecture of the city, they display manifest inferiority.  As to this I need only refer to what I said in section 42 of this book, while adding that, whereas in the hives of our Apitae all the cells are equally available for the rearing of the brood and the storage of provisions, and endure as long as the city itself, they serve only one of these purposes among the Meliponitae, and the cells employed as cradles for the nymphs are destroyed after these have been hatched.*

It is not certain that the principle of unique royalty, or maternity, is strictly observed among the Meliponitae.  Blanchard remarks very justly, that as they possess no sting and are consequently less readily able than the mothers of our own bees to kill each other, several queens will probably live together in the same hive.  But certainty on this point has hitherto been unattainable owing to the great resemblance that exists between queens and workers, as also to the impossibility of rearing the Meliponitae in our climate.

It is in our domestic bees, therefore, that the idea, of whose movements we have given a cursory and incomplete picture, attains its most perfect form.  Are these movements definitely, and for all time, arrested in each one of these species, and does the connecting-line exist in our imagination alone?  Let us not be too eager to establish a system in this ill-explored region.  Let our conclusions be only provisional, and preferentially such as convey the utmost hope, for, were a choice forced upon us, occasional gleams would appear to declare that the inferences we are most desirous to draw will prove to be truest.  Besides, let us not forget that our ignorance still is profound.  We are only learning to open our eyes.  A thousand experiments that could be made have as yet not even been tried.  If the Prosopes, for instance, were imprisoned, and forced to cohabit with their kind, would they, in course of time, overstep the iron barrier of total solitude, and be satisfied to live the common life of the Dasypodae, or to put