Her brain and mind are of the humblest order. She
never organizes anything, and does not rule even herself, but does what
she is told. She is entirely specialized for motherhood; but the
thinking, and the determination of the conditions of her motherhood, are
in the hands of other females, also highly specialized, and certainly
the least selfish of living things--_yet themselves sterile, incapable
of motherhood_.
Observe, further, that these wonderful workers, so highly endowed in
terms of brain, are amongst the children of the queen, herself a fool;
and that it was the conditions of nourishment, the conditions of
environment or education, which determined whether the young creatures
should develop into queens or workers, fertile fools or sterile wits. We
have here an absolute demonstration that environment or nurture can
determine the production of these two antithetic and radically opposed
types of femaleness.
Now, amongst the bees, this high degree of specialization works very
well. How old bee-societies are we cannot say. We do know, at any rate,
that bees are invertebrate animals, and therefore of immeasurable
antiquity compared with man. No one can for a moment question the
eminent success of the bee-hive; and that success depends upon the
extreme specialization of the female, so as in effect to create a third
sex. Further, we know that nurture alone accounts for this remarkable
splitting of one sex into two contrasted varieties.
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