WHAT BEES MAY THINK OF MEN.

A'MAN must be very blind, very incapable of the most ordinary generalization, who does not see that bees stand morally and politically to many flies and other insects much in the relation of man to apes and other savages. Or, if you please (because we do not pretend to settle the details of the analogy, we only stipulate for it in the gross), that the bee, -the wasp, the hor- net, the humble-bee, may stand for the various civilized com- munities of man on the globe, as compared with sundry flies, which, as the lowest savages and apes,.live in.motley groups, very busily and jollily,perhaps, but without appreciable organization. Let the bees stand for,England, then the big and distant hornet will do for Russia, and the flighty, graceful, omnipresent, marauding wasp for France. Germany will be the busy, buzzing, rustic, yet fierce, little humble-bee, and so on. Or shall the bedizened wasp stand for the bedizened banditti of the Apennines. or Pyrenees? Any how the .main analogy is patent,—it is not superficial,—it lies in the heart of the matter. Has man a language? So have the bees, as we shall show on.good authority. iHas man an art and a science? So have the bees. Does he transmit his ideas? The.bees do likewise. To repeat-the quotation. from Shakespeare made by an accurate student* of bees :—

" So.work the honey=bees

Creatures that by a rule in nature-teach

The it of order to a peopled kingdom.

They have a king, and officers of sorts, Where some, like magistrates, correct at home ; Others, like merchants, venture trade abroad ; Others, like-soldiers, armed in their stings, Make. booties on the summer's velvet buds, Which pillage they with every march bring home To the tent royal of their emperor ; Who, busied in his majesties, surveys The singing masons building roofs of gold ; The civil citizen kneading up the honey ; The poor mechanic porters crowding in Their heavy burthens at his narrow gate ; The sad-eyed justice, with his surly hum, Delivering o'er to executors pale The lazy, yawning drone."

These lines, so magnificently true, we quote almost with regret, their substantial truth having a tendency to invest them with the air not of absolute truth but of ingenious parallelism. But let us for a moment imagine the condition of man and the bees reversed. Sup- pose man were the size of the bee and tbe bee the size of the man, would the diminished size of man affect the worth of his intellectual and moral ideas in themselves*? Even as he is what is he seen from a, balloon? What is he seen from the moon? A vast deal less than the bee actually is to us seen through the glass of our own relative magnitude. Yet is he as thus seen less noble in reason, less in- finite in faculties, less admirable and express in form and moving, less in action like an angel, in apprehension less like a god, the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals? Surely not. And if some Hamlet of a bee chose to speak of bees as Hamlet spoke of man, though we might perhaps smile, we certainly could not object, seeing that Shakespeare, who created Hamlet, gives the bees in the lines we quoted above every right to think as much of themselves, as man of himself. And all this is still only relatively. The consequences of the inverdon of size, if looked at positively and economically, are equally if not more striking. Our size adds not a jot to the worth of our ideas and feelings in the scheme of the world. But it adds just everything to our weight and influence on our own globe. If the bee had been the size of man and man the size of the bee, man would certainly not have been master of the globe. Sir John Herschel indeed in his intro- duction to the study of natural philosophy speaks very eloquently of the defencelessness of man. But the truth is that in the savage state man is beyond comparison the most ferocious, adding colder purpose to ferocity, among animals. Babies are defenceless of course, but so are whelps, so are larva. Supposing the bee to be the size of man, she would have reigned mistress of the globe far more supremely than we could ever pretend to. What can a savage do in beauty and delicacy at all comparable with the work of the bee ? What is his best armour to the terrible dagger which is part of her very frame, what are his tools compared to the car- penter's muitum in parry which she carries about her? Endowed with flight too, who can tell her chances of conflict with the powers • Bees: their Habits, Management. and Treatment. By the Rev. J. G. Wood (RoaUedge), whose book we can heartily recommend to all losers of natural history and all students of bees. of nature ? What chance would the elephant or rhinoceros stand against a winged warrior that could settle at will on his back, stab him behind, and devour him before? And if the bee builds as an insect, in ivory and gold, and lives upon nectar, what would she have built had she been unquestioned mistress of the earth, skipping rivers with easy flight, surveying countries as from a balloon, perhaps able to fly with ease across the ocean, cer- tainly able to tear up the bowels of the earth with her own naked strength in a manner to astonish the most herculean navvy, and taught by dominion, spurred by growing ambition, and aided by flight,—to supplement her already prodigious strength 'by construc- tions and engineering-devices of which we in our-rudeness have no conception?

But it will be said these suppositions are idle. They are not, and therefore they cannot be. They are not, certainly not within our experience. That they cannot be, that they are not on some other globe, for instance, is what a man must be a bold man to affirm. What is it that prevents the bee being bigger here? It may be some constituent in the atmosphere so minute on this globe as to prevent the insects who depend upon it from growing anylarger. Horses feeding on one soil go to bone, on another to flesh. 'May not globes, alike in the main, yet by a minute inver- sion in the proportion of the gases, for instance, change the whole relations between the orders of the animal kingdom, assuming those .orders to be, as they may very well be on many globes, substantially alike? Suppose a globe, for instance, in which that substance or those conditions, whatever they are (are they known ?) which give flies, and bees, and other insects, their dark metallic hues, should be greatly in the ascendant, is it inconceivable that on that globe the entomological should be and would be the supreme Order, trampling on two-legged fearfully and 'wonderfully made diminu- tive creatures, as we trample on the flies and insects here? That the bee is wonderfully made is certain. Her nervous system is apparently far more intricatethan ours. And physiologists know the whole consequences of that one single fact.

We have said that it is demonstrable, let us say all but de- monstrable, that bees have a language, and of course a memory. Dr. Bevan mentions the following anecdote :—" A colony had been attacked in 1804 by the sphinx (moth) and suffered through too tardy preparations. In 1807 the moth re-appeared, when the bees immediately constructed freshramparts. Now, working bees do not :live more than a year at the outside." We need not follow Mr. Wood, and specify the consequence. Again, it is clear that they have not instinct merely, but reason. Instinct can only mean the stereotyped 'repetition of stereotyped acts under :stereotyped circumstances. If the adaptation of means, however clumsy, to ever shifting circumstances can be called instinct, then all we can say is that man's instinct 'transcends the instinct .of animals only in degree. If not, then animals and insects, in whatever degree, give demonstrable proofs of reason. Take the following instances :—Quoting again from Dr. Bevan, Mr. Wood says, " A very striking illustration of the reasoning power of bees -occurred to my friend Mr. Walond. Inspecting his bee boxes at the end of October, 1817, he perceived that a centre comb, bur- dened with honey, had separated from its attachments,' and 'was leaning against another comb, so as to prevent the passage of the

bees between them. This accident excited great activity in the .colony, but its nature could not be ascertained at the time." " At

the end of a week," Mr. Wood continues, " the weather being cold and the bees clustered together, Mr. Walond observed through the window of the box that they had constructed two horizontal pillars between the combs alluded to and had removed so much of the

-honey and wax from the top of each as to allow the passage of a bee; in about ten days more there was an uninterrupted thoroughfare, the detached comb at its upper part had been secured by a strong

barrier and fastened to the window with 'the spare wax. This being accomplished the bees removed the horizontal pillars first con- structed as being of no further use." Will anybody after reading this deny that bees have reason and science? Is science less science for being implicit, i. e., involved in spontaneous but reflective and

adaptive action, and not explicitly laid down in books? If every Englishman were a Stephenson and every Englishwoman a Brunel, and we had no encyclopedia of engineering, because we wanted none,

should we-not laugh at those who said that we, poor things, had only instinct not reason ? Have we not our own jokes against the " book- ish?" If humanity were perfect there could be no books ! Are the

bees less perfect because they accomplish great feats of engineering,

regard being had to their size, which are quite equal to our own under ordinary circumstances ? 'Ordinary circumstances ! Show us the English child who will build a perfect, practically perfect, hexagon, and alter it to suit circumstances I Why such an ordinary degree of education in the children of our shires would be deemed' visionary, impracticable, the dream of an enthusiast ! The bees have it, and we the wonderful say, " Pooh ! you have only instinct, it is nothing in you. Give me instinct, and I could do the same." " Instinct !" says the bee, " nonsense ! So when a central comb gets detached, which in proportion to me is as big as your clumsy houses in proportion to you, and 'I support it by pillars and alter it to snit circumstances, you call that instinct, do you? Pray what do you call it in your engineer who built a tubular bridge over some straits or other of yours with his naked eye, and boasted his ignorance of mathematics ? Had he only instinct T' But the instances we quote are the veriest fragtnent of the evi- dence, which demonstrates as clearly as the sun in heaven that the bees are an organized polity, a civilized community, differing from us no doubt more than Turks or Chinamen from Christians, but bound together by ties of language, experience, affection, common aims, in a word all, perhaps even more than all, the ties wherewith we are bound together. Pray if the bees were our size and we theirs, what would they think of us? Our language they would describe as a hum, our finest flights of eloquence as a rather louder hum than usual, our music as comical chirping, our books as curious scraps of industry, to serve, as far as they could see, curiously base uses, our houses as showing a very incomplete sense of symmetry, our relations to one another as being almost incom- prehensible, and excepting -in the one cardinal fact that, with the exception of one or two varieties of the insect man, one male went with one 'female, all other relations as below the pains of a bee of the world to understand. Perhaps some poor eecen- tric bee might waste her precious life and die in a garret in the attempt to fathom the useless mystery of that pretty and curious little two legged and two-handed insect man; but the vocation of the public-minded bee would bid her attend to very much higher matters.