and equally sized spheres would not of itself be of any obvious benefit
either to individual bees or to the society at large: in order that it
should enable material and labour to be saved it would have to be
accompanied by the habit of making the cells at special distances from
each other. And, in the second place, though some few individuals should
present themselves with an innate tendency to choose these special
distances, whatever advantage might result therefrom, whatever saving of
material or labour, would be shared in equally by the whole community,
the particular individuals to whom it was due benefiting by it no more
than any of the rest, and not being, in consequence, more likely than
they to survive in any struggle for existence, or to leave behind them
offspring inheriting their special characteristics. No help, therefore,
can be derived from Mr. Darwin's principles towards conjecturing why a
small minority of such specially endowed bees should be gradually
converted into a majority, and should eventually constitute the whole
community, thereupon becoming in fact converted into a new species. Let
us, however, liberally waive this and all similar objections, and assume
a community of hive bees to have been, in the utterly unaccountable
manner indicated by the term spontaneous variation, developed from a
meliponish stock. Unfortunately, all our liberality will be found to
have been thrown away without perceptibly simplifying the problem to be
solved. For, whatever be among meliponae the distribution of the
generative capacities, among hive bees, at any rate, all workers are
sterile neuters, which never have any offspring to whom to bequeath
their cellmaking skill, while the queen bee and drones, which alone can
become parents, have no such skill to bequeath. Clearly the formula of
'descent with modification by natural selection,' is, in its literal
sense, utterly inapplicable here. In whatever manner the cell-making
faculty might have been acquired by the first homogeneous swarm of hive
bees, it must inevitably have terminated with the generation with which
it commenced, if transmission by direct descent had been necessary for
its continuance. The only resource open to Mr. Darwin is to suppose, not
merely (what is, indeed, obviously the fact) that queen bee after queen
bee, besides generating each in turn a progeny of workers endowed with
instincts which their parents did not possess and could not therefore
im