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Leaving out of consideration the tubicolous annelidæ, the mussels and stone-boring molluscs, the weaving caterpillars, and finally spiders, even the non-social hymenoptera present, among many insects, examples of a very skilful adaptation of materials.
The true motive of his idleness is ineptitude. It is a curious thing that the Hymenoptera, the most skilful of all industrial insects, know nothing of paternal labour. The male of the genus, in whom we should expect the requirements of the young to develop the highest aptitudes, is as useless as a butterfly, whose family costs so little to establish.
Among Hymenoptera the lazy profess the theory that pollen belongs to all bees, and that stored-up honey does not constitute private property.
To keep these insects at their disposal, Hymenoptera act in various ways: some, who are a little experienced, are content to take advantage of a free aphis which chance may put in their way; others shut up their cattle in stables situated in the midst of the ant-hill, or else pen them in the country at a spot where they can best find their food.
On the other hand, taking the caterpillar or bee larva, with their cylindrical, fleshy bodies, in most respects typical of larval forms of the Hymenoptera, Lepidoptera and Diptera, as the type of the cruciform larva, etc. * The larvæ of the earliest insects were probably leptiform, and the cruciform condition is consequently an acquired one, as suggested by Fritz Müller."
This is more especially difficult in those Orders, such as Orthoptera, Hymenoptera, and Coleoptera, in which the two sexes rarely differ much in colour; for we are then left to mere analogy.
We will cut short these details concerning the cells, which the Zebra Halictus has already shown us in greater perfection, leave the home to itself and come to the most striking feature in the life-history of the Halicti. The Cylindrical Halictus is at work in the first days of May. It is a rule among the Hymenoptera for the males never to take part in the fatiguing work of nest-building.
If one could speak, otherwise than metaphorically, of an impulse toward social life, it might be said that the brunt of the impulse was borne along the line of evolution ending at man, and that the rest of it was collected on the road leading to the hymenoptera: the societies of ants and bees would thus present the aspect complementary to ours. But this would be only a manner of expression.
When we urged the obvious facts he would say: "Fiddlesticks!" or "Hang your facts I tell you it can't be done!" And we never succeeded in shutting him up till Jeff dragged in the hymenoptera. "'Go to the ant, thou sluggard' and learn something," he said triumphantly. "Don't they cooperate pretty well? You can't beat it.
The same privilege is possessed by the predatory Hymenoptera, the Wasps, at least by those in whom the two sexes are of a different size and consequently require an amount of nourishment that is larger in the one case than in the other.
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