Page - 288 - in The Origin of Species

288 ORIGIN OF SPECIES advantageous to our humble-bees, if they were to make their cells more and more regular, nearer together, and aggre- gated into a mass, like the cells of the Melipona; for in this case a large part of the bounding surface of each cell would serve to bound the adjoining cells, and much labour and wax would be saved. Again, from the same cause, it would be advantageous to the Melipona, if she were to make her cells closer together, and more regular in every way than at pres- ent; for then, as we have seen, the spherical surfaces would wholly disappear and be replaced by plane surfaces; and the Melipona would make a comb as perfect as that of the hive-bee. 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 economis- ing labour and wax. Thus, as I believe, the most wonderful of all known in- stincts, 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 dis- tance 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.