Like ants, bees are subject to parasites, and as some belonging to the former are ants themselves, so with bees we have the same thing, but developed to a still more striking extent; for there is no ant that I know of that lives with another which it so closely resembles that the latter is unable to distinguish it from itself. Such bees, however, there are. Some of our humble bees, for instance, go through life thus attended by a double whose existence it never for one moment suspects. The two, indeed, are linked in the closest bonds of social intimacy. Together they leave the nest, together they fly from flower to flower, together they re-enter it. Together, too, they seem to glow in industry—to emulate each other’s toil. But all the while that the true industrious bee is collecting pollen and nectar the double is only pretending to do so—or rather, let us say, seeming—and whilst the former bustles about, feeding the larvæ and making the cells, the latter only bustles about, like the shadow of a busy person on the wall. But when the true bee lays an egg, the double lays one too, almost at the same moment, and in the very same cell. Both are then hatched, together, and the two larvæ grow up in the same cradle, nourished by the same food, make their transformation side by side, and so creep forth into the nest. The two, as I say, are hardly to be distinguished one from another, yet all the while one is a real true-hearted humble bee, and the other a mere show, a stage make-up, an outer shell without any of the proper qualities inside. And the best of the joke is, that, probably, the false or cuckoo bee, as it is called, is as much deceived as its foster relatives, and imagines itself a good honest sterling member of the community. It is forced by nature to cheat, but the fraud is unconscious, and the impostor is imposed on in its turn. Thus in the insect world we have something which can only be brought about, amongst ourselves, through a conscious disguise, by means of wigs, false moustaches, etc.—what we call an impersonation—but here is a life-long impersonation which costs the “born actor” no trouble. Why is this? What is the meaning of it? Why should one bee—or any other insect or creature—look just like another one, and yet have a Latin name of its own, which the other has no right to? Why should the individuals of one species be hardly more like each other than they are like the individuals of another species, even though—as is often the case—these two species are widely separated in the system of nature? Such are the questions to which a consideration of these cuckoo-bees, as they are called, give rise. They will be answered, if at all, in the following chapter. ----- Footnote 86: Fabre, Insect Life, pp. 275-283. Footnote 87: Peckham, The Instincts and Habits of the Solitary Wasps. Footnote 88: Bingley, Animal Biography. Footnote 89: The real purple of the ancients was a rich red—crimson or vermilion. Footnote 90: