They certainly exercise a will, evinced by their power of discrimination, which decides what is salutary and what is noxious; and the passions are exemplified in their revenge, their sexual love, and their affection for their offspring, the latter being exhibited in their unremitting labour and careful provision for them, although they are never to see them. If there be any precedence in the order of the relative quality and distinction of the bees, it will be shown in the degree of superiority with which this function is accomplished. The perfection of this function we see progressively maturing as it passes onwards from the merely burrowing-bee to the more complicated processes of the masons, carpenters, and upholsterers,—all solitary insects, and working each individually and separately to the accomplishment of its object. But we may certainly inquire where we shall intercalate the sagacity of the cuckoo-bees. A vast bound is immediately made from the artisan bees to the social bees with three sexes, which, as first shown in the humble-bee, works in small and rude communities, with dwellings of irregular construction. The next and most perfect grade is the metropolitan polity, accomplished architecture, laborious parsimony, indomitable perseverance, and well-organized subordination of the involuntary friend of man, the domestic bee. This insect has furnished Scriptural figures of exquisite sweetness, poetry with pleasing metaphors, morality with aphorisms, and the most elegant of the Latin poets with the subject of the supremest of his perfect Georgics. That bees feel pain may be assumed from the evidence we have of their feeling pleasure, although instances are on record of insects surviving for months impaled; and they lose a limb, or even an antenna, without evincing much suffering, and I have seen a humble-bee crawling along on the ground with its abdomen entirely torn away.