The inference is obvious: the Bee does not judge of the quantity of honey by the elevation of the surface; she does not reason like a geometrician, she does not reason at all. She accumulates so long as she feels within her the secret impulse that prompts her to go on collecting until the victualling is completed; she ceases to accumulate when that impulse is satisfied, irrespective of the result, which in this case happens to be worthless. No mental faculty, assisted by sight, informs her when she has enough, or when she has too little. An instinctive predisposition is her only guide, an infallible guide under normal conditions, but hopelessly lost when subjected to the wiles of the experimenter. Had the Bee the least glimmer of reason would she lay her egg on the third, on the tenth part of the necessary provender? Would she lay it in an empty cell? Would she be guilty of such inconceivable maternal aberration as to leave her nurseling without nourishment? I have told the story; let the reader decide. This instinctive predisposition, which does not leave the insect free to act and, through that very fact, saves it from error, bursts forth under yet another aspect. Let us grant the Bee as much judgment as you please. Thus endowed, will she be capable of meting out the future's larva's portion? By no means. The Bee does not know what that portion is. There is nothing to tell the materfamilias; and yet, at her first attempt, she fills the honey-pot to the requisite depth. True, in her childhood she received a similar ration, but she consumed it in the darkness of a cell; and besides, as a grub, she was blind. Sight was not her informant: it did not tell her the quantity of the provisions. Did memory, the memory of the stomach that once digested them? But digestion took place a year ago; and since that distant epoch, the nurseling, now an adult insect, has changed its shape, its dwelling, its mode of life. It was a grub; it is a Bee. Does the actual insect remember that childhood's meal? No more than we remember the sups of milk drawn from our mother's breast. The Bee, therefore, knows nothing of the quantity of provisions needed by her larva, whether from memory, from example or from acquired experience. Then what guides her when she makes her estimate with such precision? Judgment and sight would leave the mother greatly perplexed, liable to provide too much or not enough. To instruct her beyond the possibility of a mistake demands a special tendency, an unconscious impulse, an instinct, an inward voice that dictates the measure to be apportioned. CHAPTER 8. PARASITES.