Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/165

Rh In the general effort that produces the honey-comb, it is important to make allowance for that supreme law of necessity which Buffon refers to, and which compels each insect, if it makes a mistake in its measurements, to begin its work again, under penalty of seeing it destroyed by its neighbors. The bee's cell is no more an individual work than it is a work finished all at once. At the beginning, the six-sided plan is scarcely indicated; the original wall is clumsy, oftentimes too thick; it is attempted a second time, made thinner at the bottom, thickened at the top, crowded by force into its right place, and worked over and over constantly to the last perfection. The geometric regularity of the whole is the result of long tentative work. A multitude of bees are laboring on it at once, each for a time at one cell, then at another, and so on; twenty insects at least busy themselves with the first chamber, which at the outset is very irregular; new chambers are added, and the first remade. On all these points Darwin and other English naturalists have made very curious experiments, which deserve to be cited along with the observations of Francis Huber. He observed, to learn; they experimented, to explain. By dealing with swarms or individuals properly isolated, by modifying their conditions of labor, by deceiving their instinct, we should doubtless succeed in decomposing it by a kind of physiological analysis, at the same time that we should ascertain more clearly the tolerably large share that intelligence probably has in this industry of the bee. This is an aspect of the problem that is perhaps too much neglected by Darwin, but indicated by Mdlle. Clémence Royer in the notes added by her to the French translation of the "Origin of Species." We may ask, Why should not the bee itself be sensitive to that harmony of lines which strikes our eye in its work? Why deny so simple an impression as that which springs from regularity, to that brain which is of tiny dimensions, it is true, but which is quick to seize relations of far greater complexity between cause and effect, quick to choose the best place, to avoid an obstacle, to pursue with eye and sting the enemy of the hive? We have seen how the ant understands when an object is too large to pass through the entrance to its cave. The bee, to which we would attribute sensitiveness to regularity of lines, certainly has the notion of relations of length. There is a large moth, the death's-head sphinx, very fond of honey, and which asks nothing better than to make its way into the hive; its body, hairy and covered with horny plates, defies the sting. The bees, dreading this unwelcome visit, know very well how to protect themselves from it in regions where the sphinx abounds. As soon as the earliest ones begin to show themselves in the evenings of the longest days, as M. Blanchard relates, the bees narrow the opening of the hive in such a way that the robber can no longer get in. When the season for this moth has gone by, they destroy the new construction, and rebuild the passage of its original size. Certainly these are creatures