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
present; for then, as we have seen, the spherical surfaces would
wholly disappear, and would all 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 economising 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 economy of wax; that
individual swarm which wasted least honey in the secretion of wax,
having succeeded best, and having transmitted by inheritance its newly
acquired economical instinct to new swarms, which in their turn will
have had the best chance of succeeding in the struggle for existence.
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