NATURALISTS have recently been discussing the interesting question whether or not Bees can talk with each other. Those best informed on the subject are, we gather, inclined to regard it as perfectly possible. Such a view would, perhaps, astonish many minds not familiar with these and others of the lower creatures by daily observation. Yet the more people live in close notice of animals and insects the less inclined they will feel to draw that very difficult line which divides instinct from reason, or to set any hard and fast limit to the wonders of Nature. In fact, the very word "lower" becomes sometimes an insult, a positive affront to the wonderful life about us, which even proud Man himself has scarcely a right to offer. There could, for instance, be nothing well conceived humbler than the Earthworm. Until the illustrious Darwin took up the subject of that despised being no one comprehended the vastness of man's debt to this poor, ugly, trampled creature. The numberless millions of that obscure tribe, none the less, have created all the loam and all the arable land of the whole globe, passing through their bodies the fallen leaves and decaying vegetable matter; and by their single sphere of labor in this respect rendering cultivation and harvests possible. When we tread on that Worm we destroy an agricultural laborer of the most respectable class. To those eternal and widespread toils of the creeping friend of men we owe the woods, the meadows, and the flowers. This is, of course, only an example of the importance, not of the faculties of the lower creatures.

Nevertheless even Worms communicate sufficiently to have and to observe their seasons of love; and Bees are so much higher in the scale of life, and so richly gifted in all details of their work, and so sociable in their habits, that it would not be at all a safe thing to say they possess no means of intercourse. Certainly no skillful and watchful bee-master would ever venture upon such an assertion. He knows very well how the sounds in the hive and those produced by individual Bees vary from time to time, and in a manner which appears to convey, occasionally at all events, mutual information. A Wasp or a strange Bee entering a hive without permission seems mighty quickly to hear something not very much to its advantage, and when two or three Bees have found a good source of honey, how on earth do all the others know which path to take through the trackless air, except by some friendly buzz or wing — hint? Now, the beemasters tell us that there is surely one particular moment in the history of the hive when something very much like actual language appears to be obviously employed. It is when the young queen is nearly ready to move away. She begins to utter a series of faint, staccato, piping noises, quite different from her ordinary note, and just before she flies off this sound becomes altered to a low, delicate kind of whistle, as if emanating from some tiny fairy flute. How this small cry, or call, or signal, is produced nobody understands. The major portion of sounds in a hive is, of course, caused by the vibration more or less rapidly of the wings of the Bees. But whoever has examined the delicate machinery with which the Grasshopper makes his chirp would not be surprised to find that the queen Bee had also some peculiar contrivance by which to deliver what may be called the royal speech on the one or two great and signal occasions of her exemplary life.