When installed in one of the huge factories, bristling with frames, that we mentioned just now, these frames will interest them only to the extent in which they provide them with a basis or point of departure for their combs; and they very naturally pay not the slightest heed to the desires or intentions of man.  But if the apiarist have taken the precaution of surrounding the upper lath of some of these frames with a narrow fillet of wax, they will be quick to perceive the advantage this tempting offer presents, and will carefully extract the fillet, using their own wax as solder, and will prolong the comb in accordance with the indicated plan.  Similarly—­and the case is frequent in modern apiculture—­if all the frames of the hive into which the bees have been gathered be covered from top to bottom with leaves of foundation-wax, they will not waste time in erecting buildings across or beside these, or in producing useless wax, but, finding that the work is already half finished, they will be satisfied to deepen and lengthen each of the cells designed in the leaf, carefully rectifying these where there is the slightest deviation from the strictest vertical.  Proceeding in this fashion, therefore, they will possess in a week a city as luxurious and well-constructed as the one they have quitted; whereas, had they been thrown on their own resources, it would have taken them two or three months to construct so great a profusion of dwellings and storehouses of shining wax.

[43]

This power of appropriation may well be considered to overstep the limit of instinct; and indeed there can be nothing more arbitrary than the distinction we draw between instinct and intelligence properly so-called.  Sir John Lubbock, whose observations on ants, bees, and wasps are so interesting and so personal, is reluctant to credit the bee, from the moment it forsakes the routine of its habitual labour, with any power of discernment or reasoning.  This attitude of his may be due in some measure to an unconscious bias in favour of the ants, whose ways he has more specially noted; for the entomologist is always inclined to regard that insect as the more intelligent to which he has more particularly devoted himself, and we have to be on our guard against this little personal predilection.  As a proof of his theory, Sir John cites as an instance an experiment within the reach of all.  If you place in a bottle half a dozen bees and the same number of flies, and lay the bottle down horizontally, with its base to the window, you will find that the bees will persist, till they die of exhaustion or hunger, in their endeavour to discover an issue through the glass; while the flies, in less than two minutes, will all have sallied forth through the neck on the opposite side.  From this Sir John Lubbock concludes that the intelligence of the bee is exceedingly limited, and that the fly shows far greater skill in extricating itself from a difficulty, and finding its way.