The entire economy of the hive seems to emanate exclusively from the two most prominent attributes of instinct, that of self-preservation, and that other more important axis of the vast wheel of creation, the secured perpetuation of the kind by the conservative _στοργὴ_, or absorbing love of the offspring. The latter is more eminently developed in the social bees than in any other group of the family of these insects. In the solitary bees it presents itself as a blind impulse, unconscious of its object; for did we admit the consciousness of the purpose of their labours, we should evidently endow them with reason. How could they know, without reflection, that the food they store in the receptacle they form for the egg they will deposit, and which receptacle is exactly adapted to the size that the larva which will be hatched from it will take, is to nurture a creature they will never see, and whose wonderful transformations they will not therefore witness? In the hive bee the maternal instinct exhibits itself as an energy diffused through a multitude of individuals, but these witness the results of their solicitude, and exclusively promote its successful issue; and in these also the instinct of self-preservation is a diffused impulse, which likewise includes the preservation of the society.
As male and female conjunctively make up the species, thus do the queen-bee and the neuters collectively make up one sex,—the mother,—for the functions performed by the female alone in the case of the solitary kinds of bees are, in the genus _Apis_, separately executed. The cares and labours of maternity devolve upon these neuters, while the queen-bee’s maternal function is limited to merely laying the eggs with which she is replete, with the instinctive power of selecting for them their proper depository,—each of which is adapted in size to that of the sex which will be produced. Her maternal instinct stops abruptly here, without the development of an afterthought or care for their future thriving. The instinct of the neuters, like the anticipative promptings of the human mother, to prepare the clothing and other necessaries for her expected infant, has forecast the queen’s needs in its intermittent urgency, by progressively constructing cells fitted severally in size for the growth and nurture of neuters, the first developed; of drones, the next produced; and lastly, of queens, which soon afterwards appear; she instinctively knowing the proper time and the suitable use of them, having the faculty of distinguishing them with a view to the deposit of the particular kind of eggs of which she is for the moment parturient.