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In terms of brain and mind, using these words in a general sense, the worker-bee is almost the paragon of animals. The ancients supposed that the queen-bee was indeed the queen and ruler of the hive. Here, they thought, was the organizing genius, the forethought, the exquisite skill in little things and great, upon which the welfare of the hive and the future of the race depend.
This question of compatibilities is illustrated very strikingly by the case of the worker-bee. There is as yet no purely Mendelian interpretation of this case, Mendel's own laborious work upon heredity in bees having been entirely lost, and practically nothing having been done since.
And so the life of this wonderful city goes on. Building, harvesting, storing, nursing, ventilating and cleaning from morn till night, the little worker-bee lives for about eight months, and in that time has done quite her share of work in the world. Only the young bees, born late in the season, live on till the next year to work in the spring.
The doctrine, therefore, that the individual is designed by Nature for parenthood, the individual being primarily devised for the race, finds no exception, but rather a striking and immensely significant illustration in the case of the worker-bee, nor will it find itself in difficulties with the case of any forms of individual, however sterile, that can be quoted from either the animal or the vegetable world.
Just as a worker-bee inherits a specific form of nervous system which coöperates with the other equally determined organic systems, wherefore the animal is forced to perform "instinctively" its peculiar specialized tasks, so the mental capacity of a human being is largely determined by congenital factors. Upon these primarily depends his success or failure.
Here, it must be granted, is an individual of a very high and definite and individually complete type, no accident or sport, but, in fact, essential for the type and continuance of the species to which she belongs, and yet, though highly individualized and worthy to represent individuality at its best and highest, the worker-bee, so far from being designed for parenthood, is sterile, and her distinctive characters and utilities are conditional upon her sterility.
Nor is this argument, as I see it and will present it, invalidated in any degree by the case of such individuals as the sterile worker-bee; any more than the argument, rightly considered, is invalidated by any instance of a worthy, valuable, happy life, eminently a success in the highest and in the lower senses, lived amongst mankind by a non-parent of either sex.
Yet, as will be evident, the main argument of Geddes and Thomson leads us to a similar interpretation of this case in terms of compatibility. The worker-bee is an individual of a most remarkable and admirable kind, from whom mankind have yet a thousand truths to learn. She is distinguished primarily by the rare and high development of her nervous apparatus.
Associated insects have thus acquired many remarkable structures, which are of little or no service to the individual, such as the pollen-collecting apparatus, or the sting of the worker-bee, or the great jaws of soldier-ants. With the higher social animals, I am not aware that any structure has been modified solely for the good of the community, though some are of secondary service to it.
On the contrary, it is in such cases as that of the worker-bee that we find the warrant in apparent contradiction for our notion of the meaning of the individual, and also the key to the problem placed before us amongst ourselves by the case of inevitable spinsterhood.
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