ely adopted into his great society.
Although not more than half a dozen out of the million or more species
in this subkingdom have thus been brought to the uses of civilization,
the forms are interesting not only for what they give, but for the
promise of further contributions when this great problem of winning help
from the insect world receives adequate consideration.

As a whole, the insects are not well fitted to serve the needs of man.
Owing to certain peculiarities in their organic laws they, fortunately
for ourselves, are very limited in size. Although some of them afford
savory food and are occasionally eaten by savages, and even by civilized
folk when pressed by hunger owing to the famines which the invasions of
these animals occasionally produce, they can never be of any value as
sources of provisions, except through the stores which they accumulate
in the manner of the bees. All that we have won, or are likely to win,
from this realm is from the filaments which the creatures spin, the wax
or honey which they accumulate, the coloring or other matters which
their bodies afford, or the help which they may give us in our struggle
with invading species of their class.

Probably the first insect to be brought into friendly relations with man
was the honey-bee. This creature, like the most of our domesticated
animals, is a native of the great continent of the Old World, though it
has now been conveyed to all the flowery lands of the world where the
season is long enough for it to win its harvest. In its wild as well as
in its tame state the honey-bee dwells in one of the most perfect and
highly elaborated of insect societies. It is a member of the group of
membranous-winged insects known to naturalists as _Hymenoptera_, an
order which includes all the elaborate societies of the class except the
colonies of white ants. It is characteristic of all these colonial
insects that, from the experience of ages, they have learned the great
principles of the division of labor and of profit sharing towards which
mankind are now clumsily stumbling; the great work which their societies
are able to do is accomplished by a complete specialization of function
and a perfect share in the commonwealth. So far has this elaboration
gone, that in the bees the work of reproducing the kind is allotted to
forms which do no labor; all the work of the hive being effected by
individuals which are sterile, and whose sole function it is to toil