though they be, are still necessary for the preservation of the race?  Or is it merely an exaggerated reaction against the misfortune of the unfruitful queen?  Can we have here one of those blind and extreme precautions which, ignoring the cause of the evil, overstep the remedy; and, in the endeavour to prevent an unfortunate accident, bring about a catastrophe?  In reality—­though we must not forget that the natural, primitive reality is different:  from that of the present, for in the original forest the colonies might well be far more scattered than they are to-day—­in reality the queen’s unfruitfulness will rarely be due to the want of males, for these are very numerous always, and will flock from afar; but rather to the rain, or the cold, that will have kept her too long in the hive, and more frequently still to the imperfect state of her wings, whereby she will be prevented from describing the high flight in the air that the organ of the male demands.  Nature, however, heedless of these more intrinsic causes, is so deeply concerned with the multiplication of males, that we sometimes find, in motherless hives, two or three workers possessed of so great a desire to preserve the race that, their atrophied ovaries notwithstanding, they will still endeavour to lay; and, their organs expanding somewhat beneath the empire of this exasperated sentiment, they will succeed in depositing a few eggs in the cells; but from these eggs, as from those of the virgin mother, there will, issue only males.

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Here we behold the active intervention of a superior though perhaps imprudent will, which offers irresistible obstruction to the intelligent will of a life.  In the insect world such interventions are comparatively frequent, and much can be gained from their study; for this world being more densely peopled and more complex than others, certain special desires of nature are often more palpably revealed to us there; and she may even at times be detected in the midst of experiments we might almost be warranted in regarding as incomplete.  She has one great and general desire, for instance, that she displays on all sides; the amelioration of each species through the triumph of the stronger.  This struggle, as a rule, is most carefully organised.  The hecatomb of the weak is enormous, but that matters little so long as the victors’ reward be effectual and certain.  But there are cases when one might almost imagine that nature had not had time enough to disentangle her combinations; cases where reward is impossible, and the fate of the victor no less disastrous than that of the vanquished.  And of such, selecting an instance that will not take us too far from our bees, I know of no instance more striking than that of the triongulins of the Sitaris colletes. And it will be seen that, in many details, this story is less foreign to the history of man than might perhaps be imagined.