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Well before 1859, the veterinary surgeon William Youatt was hailing selection as ‘the magician’s wand, by means of which he may summon into life whatever form and mould he pleases’. Youatt had in mind the power of the breeder in the barnyard, but his words, quoted in the Origin of Species, equally capture the spirit of Darwin’s performance on the page, the sense the reader has of an effortless conjuring of form after form by appeal to selection. At one point Darwin confronts the perfection of the honeycomb. The hexagonal geometries of its cells store the greatest possible amount of honey per unit of wax, yet this most efficient design, beyond the skills of even the master craftsman, is the work of an uncoordinated swarm of bees. His stage set, his audience dubious, the magician proceeds. He notes first that a graduated series of structures exists at present, from the humble-bee’s irregular round cells through the Melipona bee’s comb of regular cylindrical cells to the hive-bee’s comb of regular hexagonal cells. Next he presents a geometrical argument and a number of experimental results to suggest that ‘if we could slightly modify the instincts already possessed by the Melipona, and in themselves not very wonderful, this bee would make a structure as wonderfully perfect as that of the