Beyond this stage of perfection in architecture,
natural selection could not lead; for the comb of the hive-bee, as far as
we can see, is absolutely perfect in economising labour and wax.
Thus, as I believe, the most wonderful of all known instincts, that of the
hive-bee, can be explained by natural selection having taken advantage of
numerous, successive, slight modifications of simpler instincts; natural
selection having, by slow degrees, more and more perfectly led the bees to
sweep equal spheres at a given distance from each other in a double layer,
and to build up and excavate the wax along the planes of intersection. The
bees, of course, no more knowing that they swept their spheres at one
particular distance from each other, than they know what are the several
angles of the hexagonal prisms and of the basal rhombic plates; the motive
power of the process of natural selection having been the construction of
cells of due strength and of the proper size and shape for the larvae, this
being effected with the greatest possible economy of labour and wax; that
individual swarm which thus made the best cells with least labour, and
least waste of honey in the secretion of wax, having succeeded best, and
having transmitted their newly-acquired economical instincts to new swarms,
which in their turn will have had the best chance of succeeding in the
struggle for existence.
OBJECTIONS TO THE THEORY OF NATURAL SELECTION AS APPLIED TO INSTINCTS:
NEUTER AND STERILE INSECTS.
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