"And the bees, forming a circle around the two, will eagerly watch the strange duel.""And the bees, forming a circle around the two, will eagerly watch the strange duel."
If the fight should last too long, or one of the rivals attempt to escape, then, no matter whether she be the reigning queen or the intruder, she will at once be seized and kept in the living prison until she again shows readiness to attack her foe. The reigning queen will almost always conquer, being emboldened and encouraged perhaps by the knowledge that she is fighting in her own home, with her subjects around her. Perhaps too the bees may make some difference in their treatment of the rivals during the period of imprisonment, for their mother seems scarcely to suffer from it at all, while the stranger always appears a little weakened and bruised.
We have shown that, if the queen be taken away from the hive, her people will mourn her, and display every sign of the deepest distress. If she be put back, a few hours later, her daughters will hasten joyfully towards her, offering honey; one section will respectfully form a lane for her to pass through, while others, their heads bent low, will move in great semi-circles before her, singing the song of welcome that is only heard at moments of great happiness and solemn devotion.
But if a new queen were placed in the hive, instead of the old one, the greatest trouble and disturbance would ensue. The bees would know at once that a trick had been played on them; the impostor would be seized, and immediately confined in the terrible living walls made by their bodies, and held there until she died. She will hardly ever be allowed to come out alive.
There are ways, however, of dealing with this hatred of the new-comer; and one of them is to bring her into the hive enclosed in a little cage with iron wires, which is hung between two combs. The door of the cage is made of wax and honey; the bees, after their first display of fury, will gnaw at the wax and honey, thus freeing the prisoner, who will then sometimes be allowed to go unharmed, and be subsequently accepted. There is another way, too, that is used by a bee-master at Rottingdean, who imagined that the unfavorable reception of the new queen might in some degree be caused by her own curious behavior. No sooner will she have been put into the hive than she will rush wildly to and fro, vainly trying to hide in one place or another, and generally doing all she can to make the bees suspicious. Mr. Simmins, the bee-master in question, shuts the queen up for half an hour without any food before putting her into the hive. He then carefully raises a corner of the cover, and drops her on to the top of one of the combs. She seems overjoyed at finding the bees around her, and as she is starving she gladly accepts the food that they offer her. The workers, deceived by her manner, seem to believe that she actually is their old queen who has come back to them, and welcome her joyfully. In this case, therefore, it would seem that Huber, and the other experts who declare that the bees can always recognize their own queen, are not entirely right.
And there is also this to be said about the affection the bees have for their queen. That affection is real, and certainly exists; but it is certain also that it does not last very long. If you were to put back into the hive a queen who had been away for several days, her daughters would receive her so badly that you would have to snatch her up very quickly, and take her away. The explanation is that the bees will have made their arrangements to replace her, and will have turned a dozen workers'cells into royal cradles, thus providing for a new queen and rendering the future safe. They will therefore have nothing more to do with the old one.
The future is the bees' one consideration, and they sacrifice everything to it. As a curious instance, one may mention the way in which they will deal with a mouse, or a slug perhaps, that shall have managed to get into the hive. They will very soon kill the intruder, but then have to consider how they will get rid of the body. If they are unable to drag it out of the hive or tear it to pieces, they will build a perfect waxen tomb round it, which will tower strangely above the ordinary monuments of the city. In one of my hives last year I found three such tombs side by side; they had been made with party-walls, like the cells of the comb, so that no wax should be wasted. The careful grave-diggers had raised these tombs over the remains of three snails that a child had dropped into the hive. Generally, in the case of snails, the bees will be satisfied to seal the opening of the shell with wax. But here it seemed that the shells were broken, and the bees had therefore thought it wiser to bury the entire snail; and so that the entrance-hall should not be blocked, they had made a number of galleries, wide enough for the male bees, which are almost twice as big as the workers, to pass through. In districts where the hideous death's-head moth abounds, the bees erect little columns of wax at the entrance of the hive, and place them so closely together that the night-thief cannot pass through.
And now to return to our swarming hive, where the bees have already given the signal for flight. And at once, as though with one sudden impulse, every gate in the city is flung open wide; and the black throng issues, or rather pours forth, in a double or treble jet, in a throbbing, quivering stream, that quickly divides and melts into space, where the thousands of beating wings weave a tissue humming with sound. And this for some moments will hover above the hive, rustling like gossamer silk; then, like a veil of gladness, all stirring and quivering, it floats to and fro, from the flowers up to the sky. The radiant mantle will gather together its four sunlit corners; and, like the fairy carpet, will fly across space, steering its straight, direct course to the willow, the pear-tree or lime on which the queen will have settled. Around her each wave comes to rest, as though on a golden nail, and from it there hangs the tissue of pearls and of golden wings.
And then there is silence once more; and, in an instant, this mighty tumult, this bewildering golden hail that streamed upon every object near, becomes nothing more than a cluster of inoffensive and harmless bees, that wait patiently, in thousands of little motionless groups hanging down from the branch of a tree, for the scouts to return who have gone in search of a place of shelter.
This is the first stage of what is known as the "primary swarm," at whose head the old queen is always to be found. The bees will usually settle on the shrub or the tree that is nearest the hive; for the queen, who has spent all her life in the dark and has almost forgotten the use of her wings, is afraid to venture too far.
The bee-keeper waits till the great mass of bees is all gathered together; then, having covered his head with a large straw hat (for the most inoffensive bee will think it is caught in a trap if entangled in hair, and will at once use its sting) but, if he be experienced, wearing neither mask nor veil—having taken the precaution only of plunging his arms in cold water up to the elbow—he proceeds to gather the swarm by vigorously shaking, over an inverted hive, the bough from which the bees are hanging. Into this hive the cluster will fall just like an over-ripe fruit. Or, if the branch be too thick, he can plunge a spoon into the mass, and ladle it out, placing the living spoonfuls wherever it pleases him, as though they were grains of corn. He need have no fear of the bees that are buzzing around him, and settling on his face and hands; and he knows that the swarm will not divide, or grow fierce, will not scatter, or try to escape. This is a day when these strange workers seem to make holiday, and to be full of a faith and a confidence that nothing can shake. They have given up the treasure which they used to guard so preciously; they no longer have enemies. They are harmless because they are happy; though why they are happy we know not, unless it be because they are doing what they feel it is right to do.
Where the queen has alighted the swarm will remain; and if she goes into the hive, the long black files of the bees will closely follow, as soon as the news shall reach them. Most of them will go eagerly in; but many will stay for an instant on the threshold of the new home, and there form themselves into solemn, ceremonious circles, which is their method of celebrating happy events. "They are beating to arms," the French peasants say. The new home will at once be adopted, and its furthest corners explored. Its position, its shape, its color, are taken note of and never forgotten by these thousands of eager and faithful little memories, which have also duly recorded the neighboring landmarks; the new city is founded and the thought of it fills the mind and the heart of all its inhabitants; the walls resound with the song that proclaims the royal presence; and work begins.
But if the swarm be not gathered by man, its history will not end here. It will cling to the branch of the tree till the scouts return who have been flying in every direction looking for a new home. They will come back one by one, and give an account of their mission. The report of each scout will probably be very carefully considered. One of them, perhaps, will speak favorably of some hollow tree it has seen; another has something to say about a crack in a ruined wall, a hole in a grotto, or an abandoned burrow. Sometimes the assembly will stop and weigh matters over till the next morning; but at last the choice is made and agreed to by all. At a given moment the entire mass stirs, divides and sets forth; and then, in one sustained and impetuous flight that this time knows no obstacle, it steers its straight course, over hedges and cornfields, over haystack and lake, over river and village, to its fixed and always far-away goal. It is rarely indeed that this second stage can be followed by man. The swarm returns to nature; and we know not what becomes of it.
The bee-keeper has gathered the swarm into his hive; let us now see what they will do. And, first of all, let us not be unmindful of the sacrifice that these fifty thousand workers have made, who, as Ronsard says "In a little body bear so brave a heart," and let us, yet again, admire the courage with which they begin their life anew in the desert into which they have fallen. They have forgotten the wealth and magnificence of their native city; they are indifferent to all they have left behind. They give not a thought to the vast store of pollen that they had collected, to the 120 pounds of honey, a quantity, let it be remembered, which is more than twelve times the weight of all the bees in the hive put together, and close on 600,000 times that of the single bee. Or you might say that to us it would mean something like 42,000 tons of provisions, a great fleet laden with nourishment more precious than any known to us; for to the bee honey is a kind of liquid life, which it absorbs with almost no waste whatever.
Here, in the new abode, there is nothing; not a drop of honey, not a morsel of wax; there is nothing to begin on, there is nothing to serve as a starting-point. There is only the dreary emptiness of an enormous building with its bare sides and roof. The smooth and rounded walls enclose only darkness; under the lofty arch is a mere void. But useless regrets are unknown to the bee; at any rate, they are not allowed to interfere with work. And instead of being depressed or moping in a corner, the bee sets to at once, and more energetically than ever.
Immediately, and without the smallest delay, the tangled mass divides, splits up and forms itself into groups. Most of these will proceed, marching abreast in regular columns, like regiments obeying the word of command, and will begin to climb the steep walls of the hive. The first bees to reach the dome will cling to it with the claws of their front legs; those behind will hang on to the ones in front of them, and the next the same, and so on to the end, till long chains have been made that serve as a sort of bridge for the crowd which is ever mounting and mounting. And, by slow degrees, these chains, as the number of bees which form them becomes greater and greater, become a kind of dense, three-cornered curtain. When the the last of the bees has joined itself to this curtain that hangs in the darkness, all movement ceases in the hive; and for long hours this strange cluster will wait, in a stillness so complete as to be almost uncanny, for the mystery of wax to appear.
In the meantime, the rest of the bees—those whose business it was to remain below in the hive—have paid not the smallest attention to the others who were forming the curtain, and have made no effort whatever to add themselves to the number. They have been told off to inspect the hive, and to do what is immediately necessary. They start sweeping the floor, and most carefully remove, one by one, every twig, grain of sand, and dead leaf. This satisfactorily accomplished, they will most thoroughly examine and test the floor of the new dwelling. They will fill up every crack and crevice with a kind of raw wax; they will start varnishing the walls, from the top to the bottom. A certain number of guards will be sent to the gate, to take up their post there; and very soon a detachment of workers will go forth to the fields, whence they will come back with their store of pollen.
Before we raise the folds of the mysterious curtain, let us try to form some idea of the skill and industry shown by the bees in fitting up the new hive to serve their purposes. Within the walls there is merely a desert; they must plan out their city, decide where the dwellings shall be; and these must be built as quickly as possible, for the queen is ready to begin to lay her eggs. They must consider the ventilation of these dwellings, and these, too, must be strong and substantial. Different buildings will be wanted for the different kinds of food that are to be stored in them; also it is important that they should be handily placed, so that there shall be no difficulty in finding them; and passages and streets must be contrived between the cells and store-houses. And there are many other problems besides, too many indeed to relate, but they have all to be dealt with.
Bee-keepers provide different kinds of hives for the bees, ranging from the hollow tree, or the earthenware pot, or the familiar bell-shaped dome of straw which we find in our farmers' kitchen-gardens or under their windows, hidden away between masses of sunflowers, phlox and hollyhock, to what may be called the model factory, which is, as it were, the last word of man's ingenuity as applied to the bee. It is a building that will hold more than three hundred pounds of honey, having three or four layers of combs set in a frame which makes it easy to remove or handle the combs and take out the honey; after which, the combs can be put back in their place like a book that we return to the shelf. Now let us imagine that one fine day an obedient swarm of bees is lodged in one of these hives. The little insects are expected to be able to find their way about, to make their home there, to accept all these strange things as natural. They have to make up their minds where the winter storehouses shall be, and where the brood-cells; and these last must not be too high or too low, neither too near to or far from the entrance gate. The swarm may very likely just have come from the trunk of a fallen tree, in which there was one long, narrow gallery; it finds itself now in a tower-shaped building, whose ceiling is lost in the gloom. And in the midst of this building is a confused and bewildering network of frames and scaffolding, the like of which the bee never has seen; and all around it are puzzling signs of the impertinent interference of man.
But all this makes no difference to the bee; and no case has ever been known of a swarm refusing to do its duty, or of allowing the strangeness of its surroundings to discourage it—except only if the new home should be too much exposed to the weather, or have an offensive smell. And even then they will not give way to despair; they will promptly abandon the place, fly away and seek better fortune a little further off.
But if no objection of this kind offers itself in a huge factory of this kind, the bees will calmly go their own way, paying no heed whatever to man's desires or intentions; the frames seem to them of use for their combs, they will readily accept them. This will be more particularly the case if the bee-keeper has artfully surrounded the upper layers of the comb with a little strip of wax; the bees will pick out the wax, and go on with the comb. If this should be covered all over with leaves of foundation-wax, the bees will often be content to deepen and lengthen the cells that have been traced out in the leaves, but will be careful to alter the position of the cells should these not form an absolutely straight line. And thus, in the space of a week, they will be in possession of a city as comfortable and well-built as the one they have left; whereas, in the ordinary way, if all the work had had to be done by them, it would have taken them two or three months to erect the buildings and storehouses out of their own shining wax.
Sir John Lubbock, who has written many interesting books on ants, bees, and wasps, does not believe that the bee has any real intelligence of its own, once it departs from what it has always been accustomed to do. And as a proof of this he mentions an experiment that any one can try for himself. If you put half a dozen bees, and the same number of flies into a bottle, then place the bottle on the table with its foot to the window, you will find that the bees will be quite unable to find their way out, and will go on flinging themselves against the glass, till they die of fatigue and hunger; while the flies will all have escaped, in less than two minutes, through the open neck of the bottle. Sir John Lubbock concludes from this that the bee cannot reason at all, and that the fly shows more ingenuity in getting out of a difficulty. It is not quite sure, however, that this conclusion is the right one. If you take up the bottle and turn it round and round, holding now the neck and now the foot to the window, you will find that the bees will turn with it, so as always to face the light. It is their love of the light, it is actually because of their intelligence, that they come to grief in this experiment. They feel convinced that the escape from every prison must be there where the light shines clearest. To them glass is a mystery which they have never met with in nature; they cannot understand why they are unable to pass through it, and convinced that there must be a way, they persevere to the end; in fact, it is because of their intelligence that they make these unhappy efforts to discover the secret. The feather-brained flies, on the other hand, to whom the mystery of glass means nothing and who possess no power of thought whatever, merely flutter wildly hither and thither, and end by rushing against the friendly opening that sets them free.
As another instance of the bees' lack of intelligence, Sir John Lubbock quotes a passage from a book written by a great American bee-keeper, Mr. Langstroth: "As the fly has to feed on many substances in which it might easily be drowned, it has learned to be very prudent, and alights carefully on the edge of a vessel containing liquid food; the bee, on the other hand, plunges in headlong, and very quickly perishes. The sad fate of their companions does not hinder others from madly rushing in in their turn, to share the same miserable end. No one can understand the extent of their folly till he has seen a confectioner's shop which has been besieged by a crowd of hungry bees. I have known thousands to be strained out from a vat of sirup in which they had been drowned; thousands more kept on plunging into the boiling sweets; the floors were covered and the windows completely darkened with bees, some crawling, others flying, and some so bedaubed that they could neither fly nor crawl—not one bee in ten able to carry home its ill-gotten spoil, and yet the air filled with new hosts of thoughtless comers!"
It will not do, however, to condemn the bees too hastily; there is something to be said on their side. They are accustomed to live in the midst of nature, which has her own regular laws; and the ways of man are strange and bewildering to them. In the forest, in their ordinary life, the madness which Langstroth describes might have come over them if some accident suddenly had destroyed a hive full of honey; but in that case there would have been no fatal glass, no boiling sugar or cloying sirup; there would have been no death or danger other than that to which every animal is exposed while seeking its food. And let us remember too that it was not mere greed, not the bees' own hunger, that caused them to rush so wildly into the boiling vat. It was not for themselves that they plunged into the deadly sugar; they can always feast on honey at home, if they want to. The first thing the bee does when it returns to the hive is to add the honey which it has gathered to the general store; thirty times in an hour perhaps it will bring its offering to the marvelous treasure-house. Their labors, therefore, their eagerness, have no selfish motive; they have one desire, and one only, to increase the wealth in the home of their sisters, which is also the home of the future.
However, the whole truth must be told. Their industry is beyond all praise; their methods, their sacrifice of self, arouse all our admiration; but there is one thing that shocks us somewhat, and that is the indifference with which they regard the misfortunes or death of their comrades. The bee appears to possess two sides to her nature; in the hive, in their home, they all help and care for each other; the union between them, the fellowship, is very close and very true. A thousand bees will sacrifice themselves to avenge an injury done by a stranger to one of their sisters. But outside the hive, away from the home, all this changes; they no longer appear to know one another. If a piece of honeycomb were placed a few steps away from their dwelling, and out of the crowd of bees that would flock to it you were to crush or injure twenty or thirty, the others who had not been attacked would not even turn their head. That strange tongue of theirs, curved like some Chinese weapon, would quietly go on licking up the fluid that they regard as more precious than life, and they would pay no heed whatever to the agony, the cries of distress, of their sisters. And when they have sucked the comb dry, they will be so anxious that not one drop shall be lost, that they will even climb over the dead and the dying to lick up the honey these hold in their jaws, and not one sound and unharmed bee will make the slightest effort to help or relieve the victims. The thought that they themselves run any danger does not disturb them; they give no thought to the death that may perhaps await them too.
But the fact is that the bees do not know the meaning of fear, and smoke is the one thing in the world that they are afraid of. When they are out of the hive, they are curiously inoffensive. They will avoid anything that comes in their way, they will appear not to notice it, provided always that it does not venture too near. This indulgence, however, this meekness, hides a heart that is very sure of itself, very confident, very reliant. No threat will induce the bee to alter her course; she will never attempt to escape. Inside the hive, any danger, whatever it be, will at once be boldly faced. Should any living creature, be it ant or bear or man, venture to attack the sacred dwelling, every bee will spring up and defend the home with passionate fury.
But we must frankly admit that they show no fellowship outside the hive, and no sympathy, as we understand the word, within it. On the other hand, nowhere in the world shall we discover a more perfect organization of work for the benefit of all, a more amazing devotion to the coming generation. It may be, perhaps, that this very devotion may have caused them to ignore everything else. All their love goes to what lies ahead of them; we give ours to what is around us. And are we so sure that, in our own lives, there are not many things that we do that would seem heartless and cruel to some being who might be watching us as closely as we watch the bees?
Let us now see what means the bees have of communicating with each other. Such means must obviously exist, for it would not be possible for the work of so large a city, work which is so varied and so perfectly organized, to be carried on without them. They must have some method of communication, either by sounds or by some language of touch. This strange sense may perhaps lie in the antennæ, which are little horns, or feelers, containing, in the case of the workers, 12,000 delicate hairs and 5,000 "smell hollows"; with these antennæ they seem to question and understand the darkness.
It is evidently not only in their work that the bees are able to communicate with each other, for we know that any news, good or bad, any sudden event, will at once be noised about in the hive; the loss or return of the queen, for instance, the entrance of an enemy, the intrusion of a strange queen, or the discovery of treasure. And each separate incident produces such a different emotion among them, the sounds they make are so essentially varied, that the experienced bee-keeper, listening to the murmur that arises from the hive, can at once and without any difficulty tell what it is that disturbs the multitude that are moving restlessly to and fro in their city.
If you would like to have a more definite proof, you have only to watch a bee which shall just have found a few drops of honey on your window-sill or the edge of your table. She will immediately lap it up; and so eagerly that you will have time to put a tiny touch of paint on her belt without disturbing or interrupting her. It is not that she is greedy; she rejoices at the thought that she has found some honey for the hive. As soon as she has filled her sac, she will go, but watch her manner of going; she will not, like the fly, for instance, merely buzz around or make a dart for the window; for a moment or two she will hover about the room, with her back to the light, eagerly fixing in her mind the exact position of the honey. Then, and not till then, she will return to the hive, empty her sac into one of the provision-cells; and in three or four minutes you will find her back again, going unhesitatingly to the spot, and making straight for the honey. And so she will come and go, till evening, if need be, as long as a drop remains; and her journeys from the hive to the window, from the window to the hive, will be as regular as clock-work; there will be no interval for rest; there will be no interruption.
I will frankly admit that the marked bee often returns alone. Are there the same differences among the bees, perhaps, as among ourselves, some of them being gossips, and others not given to talk? When I was trying this experiment once a friend who was with me said that it must be mere selfishness or vanity on the part of the bee that kept her from letting her comrades know of the treasure she had found. But, be this as it may, it will often happen that the lucky bee will bring two or three friends back with her; and I have found this to be the case four times out of ten. One day it was a little Italian bee which was the first to find the honey; I marked her belt with a touch of blue paint. When she had gorged herself she flew off, and came back with two of her sisters; these I imprisoned, but did not interfere with her. After her second feast she went forth once more, and this time returned with three friends, whom I again shut away, and kept on doing this for the rest of the afternoon, when, counting my prisoners, I found that she had brought no less than eighteen bees to the feast.
One may safely say that the bees will very frequently communicate with each other, even though this is not an invariable rule. American bee-hunters are so sure of the bees possessing this faculty that their methods of searching for nests depend in some measure upon it. "They will take a box of honey," Mr. Josiah Emery writes, "to a field or a wood far away from any tame bees, and then pick up two or three wild ones, and let them fill themselves with the honey. The bees will fly off to their home with the spoil, and soon return with their friends, to whom they have told the glad news. These will again be allowed to drink their fill, and then taken to different points of the compass, and allowed to fly home; the direction of their flight will be carefully noted, and in this way the hunters are able to discover the position of the tree in which the bees have built their nest."
It is to be noticed, too, that the bees do not all come together to feed on the honey we have put on the table; there will be several seconds between the different arrivals. We ask ourselves therefore whether the bees are led by, and merely follow the original discoverer, or whether they go independently, having been told by her where it is? Experts hold different opinions as to this; in the case of the ant Sir John Lubbock is satisfied that the ant which finds the treasure merely leads the way and is followed by the others; but the ant, of course, merely crawls along the ground, while the bee's wings throw every avenue open.
My study in the country is on the first floor, and rather above the ordinary range of the flight of the bees, except at times when the lime and chestnut trees are in blossom. I took an open honeycomb, and kept it on my table for a week, without its perfume having attracted a single bee. Then I went to a glass hive that was close by the house, took an Italian bee, brought her in to my study, set her on the comb, and marked while she was feeding. When she had drunk her fill, she flew off and returned to the hive. I followed quickly, saw her crawl over the huddled mass of the bees, plunge her head into an empty cell, disgorge her honey, and then get ready to set forth again. At the entrance of the hive I had placed a glass box, divided by a trap-door into two compartments. The bee flew into this box; and as she was alone, and no other bee seemed to accompany or follow her, I left her there, and then repeated the experiment on twenty bees in succession. By means of the trap, with its two little compartments, I was able in each case to separate the marked bee from the ones that might accompany her, and to keep her a prisoner in one of the little rooms. Then I marked all the bees in the other room with paint of a different color, and set them free; I myself returned quickly to my study, to await their arrival.
Now if the bees which had not visited my study had been able to communicate with the others, and to be told by them precisely where the comb was, with instructions how to get at it, a certain number of them would have found their way to my room. I must frankly admit that, to my disappointment, there was only one that did actually arrive. And I cannot tell even whether this may not have been a mere chance. I went down and released the first bee, and my study soon was invaded by the buzzing crowd to whom she showed the way to the treasure.
We need not trouble any further with this unsatisfactory experiment of mine, for there are many other curious circumstances to be noted among the bees which make it quite certain that they can tell each other things that go much further than a mere yes or no. In the hive, for instance, the wonderful way in which they divide up their work, the way in which the work is combined, one bee holding herself in readiness to take the place of another who has finished her own particular job and is waiting for her—these things all prove that they must be able to let each other know. I have often marked bees that went out in the morning collecting food; and found that, in the afternoon, if there was no special abundance of flowers, these same bees would take on another job altogether; would either be fanning and heating the brood-cells, or perhaps adding themselves to the mysterious, motionless curtain in whose midst the sculptors and waxmakers would be at work. In the same way I have found that bees which for one whole day would be gathering nothing but pollen would, on the next, evidently in obedience to some order that had been given, devote themselves entirely to the search for nectar.
Day after day, the sun will scarcely have risen when the explorers of the dawn return to the hive, which awakes to receive the glad tidings of what is happening on the earth. "The lime-trees are blossoming to-day on the banks of the canal." "The grass by the roadside is gay with white clover.", "The sage and the lotus are about to open." "The mignonette, the lilies, are overflowing with pollen." The news is handed in to headquarters, and arrangements are quickly made to divide up the work. Five thousand of the strongest and most active will be sent to the lime-trees, while three thousand juniors sally forth to the clover. Those who yesterday were gathering nectar will to-day give a rest to their tongues and the glands of their sac, and will bring back red pollen from the mignonette or yellow pollen from the tall lilies; for you will never find a bee gathering or mixing up pollens of a different color or species, and indeed it is one of the special cares of the hive to keep the different-hued pollens apart in separate store-rooms.
The workers set out, in long black files, each one flying straight to its own particular task. George de Layens stoutly declares that they have been told where to go to, and which flowers they are to visit; that they are aware how much nectar each flower will give, and know its precise value. It is their business to collect the greatest possible amount of honey; and if we watch the different directions in which the bees fly, we will find that they divide themselves up most carefully among the flowers which offer the best chance of a prosperous harvest. As these vary day by day, so will the different orders be given. In the spring, for instance, when the fields are still bare, the bees will flock to the flowers in the woods, and eagerly visit the gorse and the violets, langworts and anemones. But, a few days later, when cabbage and colza are beginning to flower, the bees will turn their attention to these alone, neglecting the woods almost entirely, for all the abundance that still may be found there. They know that the colza and cabbage flowers are richer in honey, and therefore give them the preference; thus deciding, day by day, what plants they shall visit, their one idea being to amass the greatest value of treasure in the least possible time.
You may ask, perhaps, what does it matter to us whether the bees have or have not a real intelligence of their own? I think that it matters a very great deal. If we could be quite certain that other creatures beside ourselves are able to think or to reason it would give us something of the emotion that came over Robinson Crusoe when he saw the print of a human foot on the sandy shore of his island. Like him, we should seem less alone. And when we study, when we try to understand, the intelligence of the bees, we are at the same time trying to understand what is the most wonderful thing in ourselves; the power that enables the will to effect its purpose, and overcome obstacles in its way.
We will now go on with the story of the hive, take it up where we left it, and lift a fold of the curtain of bees which are hanging, head downwards, from the dome. A curious kind of sweat, as white as snow and airier than the down on the wing of a bird, is beginning to show itself. This is the wax that is forming; but it is unlike the wax that we know; it has no weight, it is amazingly pure, being, as it were, the soul of the honey, which is itself the essence of the flowers.
It is very difficult to follow, stage by stage, the manufacture of wax by the swarm, or even the use to which they put it, for all this comes to pass in the very blackest depth of the mass of bees all huddled together. We know that the honey in the sac of the bees that are clinging to each other turns itself into wax, but we have no idea how this is done. All we can tell is that they will stay in this position, never stirring or making the least movement, for eighteen or twenty-four hours, and that the hive becomes so hot that it is almost as though a fire had been lit. And then at last white and transparent scales show themselves at the opening of four little pockets that every bee has underneath its stomach.
When the bodies of most of the bees forming the curtain have thus been adorned with ivory tablets, we shall suddenly see one of them detach herself from the crowd, and eagerly, hurriedly, clamber over the backs of the motionless crowd till she has reached the top of the dome. To this she will fix herself firmly, banging away with her head at those of her neighbors who seem to interfere with her movements. Then, she will seize with her mouth and her claws one of the scales that hang from her body, and set to work at it like a carpenter planing a soft piece of wood. She will pull it out, flatten it, bend it and roll it, moistening it with her tongue and licking it into shape; and, when at last she has got it to be just what she wanted, she will fix it to the highest point of the dome, thus laying the stone, the foundation, of the new city; for we have here a city that is being built downwards from the sky, and not from the earth upwards, like the cities of men. To this beginning she will add other morsels of wax, which she takes from beneath her belt; and at last, with one final lick of the tongue, one last touch of her feelers, she will go, as suddenly as she came, and disappear among the crowd. Another bee will at once take her place, carry on the work from the point where the first has left it; she will go through her own carpentering, just like her sister, and add to or improve the first one's job if she thinks this is called for. And then a third will follow, a fourth and a fifth, all coming from different corners, all eager and earnest, till numbers and numbers have taken their turn, none of them finishing the work but each adding her share to the task in which all combine.
A small lump of wax, as yet quite formless, hangs down from the top of the hive. As soon as it is sufficiently thick, we shall see another bee coming out of the mass. This one is very sure of herself, puts on a little side as it were; and she is watched very closely by the eager crowd below. She is one of the sculptors or carvers; she does not make any wax herself, her job being to deal with the material which the others have provided. She marks out the first cell, settles where it shall be; digs into the block for a moment, putting the wax she has taken out from the hole on the borders around it; and then she goes, making way for another, who is impatiently waiting her turn, and will go on with the work that a third will continue, while others close by are digging away at the wax on the opposite side. And very soon we shall be able to see the outline of the new comb. In shape it will be something like our own tongue, if you can imagine this to be made up of little six-sided cells, which all lie back to back. When the first cells have been built, the architects put on the ceiling, and then start building a second row, and a third and a fourth, and so on, gallery on the top of gallery, and the dimensions so carefully worked out that there will always be ample space, when the comb is finished, for the bees to move freely between its walls.
It happens, however, sometimes that a mistake has been made; that too much space, or too little, will have been left between the combs. The bees will do the best they can to set matters right; they will slant the one comb that is too near the other, or fill up the space that has been left with a new comb specially shaped.
The bees build four different kinds of cells. There are the royal cells, rather like an acorn in shape; the large cells in which the males are reared, and provisions stored when flowers are plentiful; the small cells used as cradles for the workerbees and also as ordinary store-rooms. These last are the most common kind, and about four-fifths of the buildings will be composed of them. Then there are also a certain number of what are known as "transition-cells," irregular in shape, which connect the larger cells with the smaller.
Each cell, with the exception of the transition ones, is worked out absolutely to scale, with extraordinary accuracy. It is a kind of six-sided tube, and two layers of these tubes form the comb. It is in these tubes that the honey is stored; and to prevent it from spilling, the bees tilt the tubes slightly forward. Each cell is solidly built, and the position of one to the other has been carefully thought out and arranged. Indeed, such wonderful skill and ingenuity is shown in the construction of the cells that it is difficult to believe that instinct alone is sufficient to account for it. The wasps, for instance, also build combs with six-sided cells; but their combs have only one layer of cells, and are not only less regular, but also less substantial; further, the wasps are so wasteful in their manner of working that, to say nothing of the loss of material, they also deprive themselves of about a third of the space that they might have used. Some bees again—which are not as civilized as those in our hives—build only one row of rearing-cells and rest their combs on shapeless and extravagant columns of wax. Their provision-cells are nothing but great pots, grouped together without any system or order. You could no more compare these nests with the cities of our own honey-bees than you could a village made up of huts with a modern town.
The very greatest ingenuity is shown in the construction of the combs, quite apart from the admirable precision of the architecture. Thus, for instance, there is a most skillful arrangement of alleys and gangways through and around the comb, which provide short cuts in every direction, allow the air to circulate, and prevent any block of the traffic. The connecting cells again, which join the large cells to the small ones, are so made that their shape can be altered with the least possible delay. There may be different reasons for desiring this alteration: an overflowing harvest may render more store-rooms necessary, or the workers may consider that the population of the hive should not be further increased, or it may be considered advisable that more males should be born. In any of these cases the bees will proceed, with unerring, unhesitating accuracy and precision to make the necessary changes, turning small cells into large, and large into small; and this without any waste of space or material, without allowing a single one of their buildings to become mis-shapen or purposeless, without in any way interfering with the neatness or general harmony of the hive.
The swarm whose movements we are following have started building their combs, which are already becoming fit for use. And although, as we look into the hive, we see little happening, there will be no pause, either by day or by night, in the creation of the wax, which will proceed with amazing quickness. The queen has been restlessly pacing to and fro on the borders that shine out gleamingly white in the darkness; and no sooner has the first row of cells been built than she eagerly takes possession, together with her servants, her guardians and counselors—though whether it be she who leads them, or they who direct her, is a matter beyond our knowledge. When the spot has been reached that she, or her retinue, regard as the proper one, she will arch her back, lean forward, and introduce the end of her long spindle-shaped body into one of the cells. Her escort form a circle around her, their enormous black eyes watching her every movement; they caress her wings, they feverishly wave their antennæ as though to encourage her, to urge her on, or perhaps to congratulate her. You can always easily tell where the queen is, because around her there will be a kind of starry cockade, something like the oval brooch that our grandmothers used to wear; of this she will be the center. And there is one curious thing that we may note here: the worker-bees never by any chance turn their back to the queen. When she approaches a group they immediately form themselves so as to face her, and walk backwards before her. It is a token of respect or reverence that they never fail to show; it is the unvarying custom.
Very soon the queen will be passing from cell to cell, busily laying her eggs. She will first peep into the cell to make sure that all is in order, and that she has not been there before. In the meanwhile two or three of her escort will have hastened into the cell which she has just left, in order to see that her work has been properly done, and to care for, and as it were tuck up, the little bluish egg she has laid. From now on right up to the first frosts of autumn the queen will never stop laying; she lays while she is being fed, she even lays in her sleep, if she ever does sleep, which may perhaps seem rather doubtful.
"The queen takes possession together with her servants, guardians and counsellors.""The queen takes possession together with her servants, guardians and counsellors."
It will sometimes happen that the worker-bees, in their eagerness to find room for their honey, will have stored it in some of the vacant cells reserved for the queen; when she comes to these the workers frantically carry away the honey so that she may lay her eggs. If there is a shortage of cells for honey, and this is accumulating very fast, the bees will contrive, as quickly as they can, to get ready a block of large cells for the queen, as these take less time to build. But they are cells for male bees; and when the queen comes to them, she seems vexed; she will lay a few eggs, then stop, move away, and insist on being given the smaller cells that are used for the workers' eggs. Her daughters obey; they set to at once and reduce the size of the cells; and the queen, in the meantime, goes back to the cells at which she had started at the very beginning. These will be empty now, for the larvæ will have come to life, leaving their shadowy corner, and will already have spread themselves over the flowers around, glittering in the rays of the sun and quickening the smiling hours; and soon they will sacrifice themselves in their turn to the new generation that now is beginning to take their place in the cradles they have left.
The bees all obey the queen; and yet they themselves contrive to direct her movements; for the number of eggs that she lays will be in strict proportion to the food that is given her. She does not take it herself; she is fed like a child by the workers. And if flowers are abundant, so will the food be, and therefore the number of eggs. Here we find, as everywhere in life, cause and effect working together in a circle of which one part is always in darkness; the bees, like ourselves, obey the lord of the wheel that is always turning and turning.
Some little time back I was showing one of my glass hives to a friend, and he was almost startled to see the frantic activity there. Each comb seemed alive; on every side there was movement, hurry, bustle, activity; the nurses, incessantly stirring and doing, were busy around the broodcells; the wax-makers were forming their ladders and living gangways; the sculptors, the architects, cleaners, the builders, all were at work, feverishly, restlessly, never pausing for food or sleep; there was constant and pitiless effort among them all, save only in the cradles where lay the larvæ that soon themselves would be taking their turn in this chain of unending duty, which permits of no illness and accords no grave. And my friend, his curiosity soon satisfied, turned away, and in his eyes there were signs of sorrow, and almost of fear.
And in good truth, beneath all the gladness that we find in the hive, with its memories of precious jewels of summer—of flowers, of running waters and peaceful skies—beneath all this there dwells a sadness as deep as the eye of man ever has seen. And we, who dimly gaze at these things, we who know that around us, in our own lives, among our own people, there also is sadness, we know too that this has to be, as with all things in nature. And thus it ever shall be, so long as we know not her secret; and yet there are duties all must do, and those duties suffice. And in the meantime let our heart murmur, if it will, "It is sad," but let our reason be content to add "So it must be."
Let us now leave the new hive, which we find to be already beginning to work as before, and go back to the old one, the mother-city, which the swarm had left. Here, at the start, all looks forlorn, and dreary, and empty. Two-thirds of the population have gone, have departed forever. But thousands of bees remain; and these, whatever their feelings may be, still are faithful to the duty that lies on them, and have not forgotten what they have to do. They set to work, therefore, and try their best to fill the places of those who have joined the swarm. They start cleaning the city, look to the store-cells and put things in order there, attend to what is necessary in the hive, and despatch their bands of worker-bees to collect fresh food from the flowers.
And if the outlook at first appear rather gloomy, there still are signs of hope wherever the eye may turn. One might almost fancy oneself in one of the castles they tell of in fairy-stories, where there are millions of tiny phials along the walls containing the souls of men about to be born. For here, too, are lives that have not yet come to life. On all sides, asleep in their closely-sealed cradles, in their thousands of waxen cells, lie the larvæ, the baby bees, whiter than milk, their arms folded and their head bent forward as they wait for the hour to awake. Around them hundreds of bees are dancing and flapping their wings. The object of this seems to be to increase the temperature, and procure the heat that is needed—or perhaps there may be some reason that is still more obscure; for this dance of theirs combines some very extraordinary movements whose meaning no observer has as yet been able to understand.
In another few days the lids of these thousands of urns—of which there will be from sixty to eighty thousand in a hive—will break, and two large, earnest black eyes will peer forth, while active jaws will be busily gnawing away at the lid, to enlarge the opening. The nurses at once come running; they help the young bee out of her prison, they clean her and brush her, and with the tip of their tongue they give her the first drop of honey that ushers in the new life. But the bee that has come so strangely from another world is still trembling and pale, and stares wildly around; she has something of the look of a tiny old man who might have been buried alive, and has made his escape from his tomb. She is perfect, however, from head to foot; and she loses no time, but hastens at once to other cells that have not yet opened, and there joins in the dance and starts beating her wings with the others, so that she may help in quickening the birth of her sisters who have not yet come to life.
The most arduous labors, however, will at first be spared her. She will not leave the hive till a week has passed since the day of her birth. She will then undertake her first flight, known as the "cleansing-flight," and absorb the air into her lungs, which will fill and expand her body; and thenceforward she becomes the mistress of space. The first flight accomplished, she returns to the hive, and waits yet one week more; and then, with her sisters, who were born the same day as herself, she will for the first time sally forth and visit the flowers. A special emotion, now, will lay hold of her; a kind of shrinking, almost of fear. For it is evident that the bees are afraid; that these daughters of the crowd, of secluded darkness, shrink from the vault of blue, from the infinite loneliness of the light; and their joy is halting, and woven of terror. They cross the threshold, and pause; they depart, they return twenty times. They hover aloft in the air, their heads turned towards their home; they describe great soaring circles, their thirteen thousand eyes taking in, registering and recording, the trees and the fountain, the gate and the walls, the neighboring windows and houses, till at last the outside world becomes familiar to them, and they know that they will be able to find their way back to the hive.
It is curious how they are able to accomplish this; to return to a home that they cannot see, that is hidden perhaps by the trees, and that in any event must form so tiny a point in space. Put some of them into a box and set them free at a place that is two or three miles from their hive, they will almost invariably succeed in discovering their way home. Have they landmarks by which they guide themselves, or do they possess the instinct, the sense of direction, that is common among swallows and pigeons? Different experiments that have been made appear to show that this latter is not the case. I have, however, on more than one occasion noticed that the bees seem to pay no attention to the color or shape of the hive. It is rather the platform on which the hive rests that attracts them, the position of the entrance-gate and of the alighting-board. When the winter comes on, a hive may be taken away and put perhaps into some dark cellar where it will remain till the spring; if then it should be set a little to right or to left of its former position on the platform, all the bees, on their first return from visiting the flowers, will steer their straight, direct, unhesitating course to the precise spot which the hive had occupied in the preceding year; and it will only be after much hesitating and groping that they will find the door whose place has now been shifted. And some will be unable to do this, or will be altogether lost.
In the old hive thousands of cradles are stirring and the larvæ coming to life; such bustle and movement is there that the solid walls seem to shake. But the city still lacks a queen. In the center of one of the combs you may notice seven or eight curious structures, each one about three or four times as large as the ordinary worker's cell; they look something like the circles and hillocks that we see on the photographs of the moon. These dwellings are surrounded by guards who never leave them, and are always watchful and alert. They know that they are protecting the home of the queen that is to be.
In these cells eggs will have been placed by the old queen, or more probably perhaps by one of the workers, before the departure of the swarm; the eggs will have been taken from some cell that was near, and will be exactly the same as those from which the ordinary worker-bee is hatched. And yet the bee that will in due time come out is so unlike the others that she might almost belong to an entirely different race. Her life will last four or five years, instead of the six or seven weeks that are the portion of her worker-sister. Her body will be twice as long, her color clearer, and more golden; her sting will be curved, and her eyes have only seven or eight thousand facets instead of twelve or thirteen thousand. Her brain will be smaller, and she will have no brushes, no pockets in which to secrete the wax, no baskets to gather the pollen. She will not crave for air, or the light of the sun; she will die without once having sipped at a flower. She will spend her life in the darkness, in the midst of an ever-moving crowd; and her one thought, her one idea, will be the constant search for cradles in which she can lay her eggs. It is probable that she will not, twice in her life, look on the light of day; and as a rule she will only once make use of her wings.
A week has passed, let us say, since the old queen has gone, at the head of the swarm. The royal princesses who still are asleep in their cots are not all of the same age; for the bees prefer that there should be an interval between the birth of each one. The time of the eldest princess draws near; she is already astir, and has begun eagerly to gnaw at the rounded lid of her cradle, whose walls the workers have already for several hours been thinning, so as to make it easier for her to get out. And at last she thrusts her head through the lid; the workers at once rush eagerly to her, and help her to get clear; they brush her, caress her and clean her, and soon she is able to take her first trembling steps on the comb. At first, her food will be the same as that given to the ordinary workers, but after a very few days she is nourished on the choicest and purest milk, which is known as "royal jelly."
The princess, at the moment of birth, is weak and pale; but in a very few minutes she gets her strength, and then a strange restlessness comes over her; she seems to know that other princesses are near, that her kingdom has yet to be won, that close by rivals are hiding; and she eagerly paces the waxen walls in search of her enemies.
This is the gravest and most serious moment in the history of the hive. The bees have to consider how many swarms they intend to send out; at times they make mistakes, and leave the mother-city too empty, at times also the swarms themselves are not sufficiently strong. These are matters that the "spirit of the hive" has to settle; it has to decide whether another queen will be required, in addition to the young one who has just come to birth, in order that she may head a swarm in the future. On this decision rests the whole prosperity of the hive; and very rarely will the judgment of the bees go astray.
But let us assume that here the spirit of the hive has decided against a second swarm. The young princess, who has just come to life, will be allowed to destroy the rivals who are still asleep in their cradles. She will hasten towards them, and the guard will respectfully make way. She will fling herself furiously on to the first cell she comes across, strip off the wax with teeth and claws, tear away the cocoon and dart her sting into the victim whom she has laid bare. She will stab her to death and then go, with the same passionate fury, to the next cell, and then the next, again uncovering the cradle and killing her rival, till at last, breathless and exhausted, she has destroyed all her sleeping sisters.
The watchful circle of bees who surround her have stood by, inactive and calm, and have not interfered; they have merely moved out of her way and have let her indulge her fury; and no sooner has a cell been laid waste than they rush to it, drag out the body, and greedily lap up the precious royal jelly that clings to the sides of the cell. And if the queen should be too weak or too tired to carry out her dreadful purpose to the end, the bees will themselves complete this massacre of the innocent princesses, and the royal race, and their dwellings, will all disappear. This is the terrible hour of the hive.
At times it will happen that two queens will come to life together, though this occurrence is rare, as the bees take special pains to prevent it. But should such a case arise, the deadly combat would start the very moment the rivals come out of their cradles. Afraid of each other, and yet filled with fury, they attack and retreat, retreat and attack, till at last one of them succeeds in taking her less adroit, or less active, rival by surprise, and in killing her without risk to herself. For the law of the race has demanded one sacrifice only.
But let us suppose that the spirit of the hive has decided that there shall be a second swarm. In this case, as before, the queen will advance threateningly towards the royal cells; but instead of finding herself surrounded by obsequious servants, her way will be blocked by a guard of stern and unflinching workers. In her mad fury, she will try to force her way through, or to get round them; but in every direction sentinels have been posted to protect the sleeping princesses. The queen will not be denied; she returns again and again to the charge, puts forth every effort; but each time she will be driven back, hustled even, till at last it begins to dawn upon her that behind these little workers there stands a law that does not yield even to a queen. And at last she goes, and wanders unhappily from comb to comb, giving voice to her thwarted fury in the war-song that every bee-keeper knows well; a note like that of a far-away silver trumpet, and so clear that one may hear it, at evening especially, two or three yards away from the double walls of the hive.
This cry, this war-song, has the strangest effect on the workers. It fills them with terror, it has an almost paralyzing influence upon them. When she sends it forth, the guards, who the moment before may have been treating her rather roughly, will at once cease all opposition, and will wait, with bent heads, in meekest submission, till the dreadful song shall have stopped.
For two or three days, sometimes even for five, the queen's lament will be heard, the fierce challenge to her well-guarded rivals. And these, in their turn, are coming to life; they are beginning to gnaw at the lids of their cradles. Should they emerge from them while the angry queen is still near, with her one desire to destroy them, a mighty confusion would spread itself over the city.
But the spirit of the hive has taken its precautions, and the guards have received the necessary instructions. They know exactly what must be done, and when to do it. They are well aware that if the princesses were to come out of their lodging too soon, they would fall into the hands of their furious elder sister, who would destroy them one by one. To avoid this, therefore, the workers keep on adding layers of wax to the cells as fast as the princesses within are stripping it away; so that all their gnawing and eagerness are of no avail, and the captives must bide their time. One of them perhaps will hear the war-cry of her enemy; and although she has not yet come into contact with life, nor knows what a hive may be, she answers the challenge from within the depths of her prison. But her song is different; it is hollow and stifled, for it has to pass through the walls of a tomb; and when night is falling and noises are hushed, while high over all is the silence of the stars, the bee-keeper is able to distinguish, and recognize, this exchange of challenges between the restlessly wandering queen and the young princesses still in their prison.
The young queens will have benefited by the long stay in their cradles, for when at last they come out they are big and strong, and able to fly. But this period of waiting has also given strength to the first-born queen, who is now able to face the perils of the voyage. The time has come, therefore, for the second swarm, called the "cast," to depart, with the eldest queen at its head. No sooner has she gone than the workers left in the hive will release one of the princesses from her cradle; she will at once proceed to show the same murderous desires, to send forth the same cries of anger, as her sister had done before her, till at last, after another three or four days, she will leave the hive in her turn, at the head of the third swarm, to build a new home far away. A case has been known where a hive, through its swarms and the swarms of its swarms, was able in a single season to send forth no less than thirty colonies.
This excessive eagerness, which is known as "swarming-fever," usually follows a severe winter; and one might almost believe that the bees, always in touch with the secrets of nature, are conscious of the dangers that threaten their race. But at ordinary times, when the seasons have been normal, this "fever" will rarely occur in a strong and well-governed hive; many will swarm only once, and some, indeed, not at all.
The second swarm will in any event generally be the last, as the bees will be afraid of unduly impoverishing their city, or it may be that prudence will be urged upon them by the threatening skies. They will then allow the third queen to kill the princesses in their cradles; whereupon the ordinary duties of the hive will at once be resumed, and the bees will have to work harder than ever in order to provide food for the larvæ and generally to replenish the storehouses before the arrival of winter.
The second and third swarms will sally forth in the same way as the first, with the difference only that the bees will be fewer in number, and that, owing perhaps to less scouts being available, operations will not be conducted with quite as much prudence and forethought. Also, the younger queen will be more active and vigorous than her sister, and will therefore fly much further away, leading the swarm to a considerable distance from the hive. As a consequence, these second and third swarms will have greater difficulties to meet, and their fate will be more uncertain. So all-powerful, however, is the law of the future, that none of these perils will induce the queen to show the least hesitation. The bees of the second and third swarms display the same eagerness, the same enthusiasm, as those of the first; the workers flock round the fierce young queen, as she gropes her way out of her cell, and there is not one of them that shrinks from accompanying her on the voyage where there is so much to lose and so little to gain. Why, one asks, do they show this amazing zeal; what makes them so cheerfully abandon all their present happiness? Who is it selects from the crowd those who shall stay behind, and dictates who are to go? The exiles would seem to belong to no special class; around the queen who is never to return, veteran foragers jostle tiny worker-bees who will for the first time be facing the dizziness of the skies.
We will not attempt to relate the many adventures that these different swarms will encounter. At times, two of them will join forces; at others, two or three of the imprisoned princesses will contrive to join the groups that are forming. The bee-keeper of to-day takes steps to ensure that the second and third swarms shall always return to the mother-hive. In that case, the rival queens will face each other on the comb; the workers will gather around and watch the combat; and, when the stronger has overcome the weaker, they will remove the bodies, forget the past, return to their cells and their storehouses, and resume their peaceful path to the flowers that are awaiting and inviting them.
If the skies remain pure, the air still warm, and pollen and nectar are plentiful in the flowers, the workers will endure the presence of the males for a brief space longer. The males are gross feeders, untidy in their habits, wasteful and greedy; fat and idle, perfectly content to do nothing but feast and enjoy themselves, they crowd the streets, block up the passages, and are always in the way; they are a nuisance to the workers, whom they treat with a certain good-natured arrogance, apparently never suspecting how scornfully they themselves are regarded, or the deep and ever-growing hatred to which they give rise. They are still happily unconscious of the fate in store for them.
Careless of what the workers have to do, the males invariably select the snuggest and warmest corners of the hive for their pleasant slumbers; then, having slept their fill, they stroll jauntily to the choicest cells, where the honey smells sweetest, and proceed to satisfy their appetite. From noon till three, when the radiant countryside is a-quiver beneath the blazing stare of a July or August sun, the drones will saunter on to the threshold, and bask lazily there. They are gorgeous to look at; their helmet is made of enormous black pearls, they have doublet of yellowish velvet, two towering plumes and a mantle draped in four folds. They stroll along, very pleased with themselves, full of pomp and pride; they brush past the sentry, hustle the sweepers, and get in the way of the honey-collectors as these return laden with their humble spoil. Then one by one, they lazily spread their wings, and sail off to the nearest flower, where they doze till they are awakened by the fresh afternoon breeze. Thereupon they return to the hive, with the same pomp and dignified air, sure of themselves and perfectly satisfied; they make straight for the storehouses, and plunge their head up to the neck into the vats of honey, taking in nourishment sufficient to restore their strength that has been exhausted by so much labor; afterwards, with ponderous steps, seeking the pleasant couch and giving themselves up to the good, dreamless slumber that shall fold them in its embrace till it be time for the next meal. But bees are less patient than men; and one morning the long-expected word of command goes through the hive. And there is a sudden transformation: the workers, hitherto so gentle and peaceful, turn into judges, and executioners. We know not whence the dreadful word issues; it may be that endurance has reached its limit, and that indignation and anger have bubbled over. At any rate we find a whole portion of the bee-people giving up their visits to the flowers, and taking on themselves the administration of stern justice.
An army of furious workers suddenly attacks the great idle drones, as they lie pleasantly asleep along the honeyed walls, and ruthlessly tear them from their slumbers. The startled drones wake up, and stare round in amazement, convinced at first that they must be dreaming, and the prey of some dreadful nightmare. There must be some shocking mistake; their muddled brains grope like a stagnant pond into which a moonbeam has fallen. Their first impulse is to the nearest food-cell, to find comfort and inspiration there. But gone for them are the days of May honey, the essence of lime-trees and the fragrant ambrosia of thyme and sage, of marjoram and white clover; the path that once lay so invitingly open to the tempting reservoirs of sugar and sweets now bristles with a burning-bush of poisonous, flaming stings. The air itself is no longer the same; the dear smell of honey is gone, and in its place only now the terrible odor of poison, of which thousands of tiny drops glisten at the tip of the threatening stings. Around them is nothing but fury and hatred; and before the bewildered creatures have begun to realize that there is an end to the happy conditions of the hive, each drone is seized by three or four ministers of justice, who proceed to hack off his wings and antennæ and deftly pass their sword between the rings of his armor. The huge drones are helpless; they have no sting with which to defend themselves; all they can do is to try to escape, or to oppose the mere force of their weight to the blows that rain down. Forced on to their back, with their enemies hanging on to them, they will use their powerful claws to shift them from side to side; or, with a mighty effort, will turn round in wild circles, dragging with them the relentless executioners, who never for a moment relax their hold. But exhaustion soon puts an end; and, in a very brief space, their condition is pitiful. The wings of the wretched creatures are torn off, their antennæ severed, their legs hacked in two; and their magnificent eyes, now softened by suffering, reflect only anguish and bitterness. Some die at once of their wounds, and are dragged away to distant burialgrounds; others, whose injuries are less, succeed in sheltering themselves in some corner, where they lie, all huddled together, surrounded by guards, till they perish of hunger. Many will reach the gate, and escape into space, dragging their tormentors with them; but, towards evening, driven by famine and cold, they return in crowds to the hive and pray for admission. But there they will meet the merciless guard, who will not allow one to pass; and, the next morning, the workers, before they start on their journey to the flowers, will clear the threshold of the corpses that lie strewn on it; and all recollection of the idle race will disappear till the following spring.
It will often happen that, when several hives are placed close together, the massacre of the drones will take place on the same day. The richest and best-governed hives are the first to give the signal; smaller and less prosperous cities will follow a few days later. It is only the poorest and weakest colonies that will allow the males to live till the approach of winter. The execution over, work will begin again, although less strenuously, for flowers are growing scarce. The great festivals of the hive, the great tragedies, are over. The autumn honey, that will be needed for the winter, is accumulating within the hospitable walls; and the last reservoirs are sealed with the seal of white, incorruptible wax. Building ceases; there are fewer births and more deaths; the nights lengthen and days grow shorter. The rain and the wind, the mists of the morning, the twilight that comes on too soon—these entrap hundreds of workers who never return to the hive; and over this sunshine-loving little people there soon hangs the cold menace of winter.
Man has already taken for himself his good share of the harvest. Every well-conducted hive has presented him with eighty or a hundred pounds of honey; there are some even which will have given twice that quantity, all gathered from the sun-lit flowers that will have been visited a thousand or two times every day. The bee-keeper gives a last look at his hives, upon which slumber now is falling. From the richest he takes some of their store, and distributes it among those that are less well-provided. He covers up the hives, half closes the doors, removes the frames that now are useless, and abandons the bees to their long winter sleep.
They huddle together on the central comb, with the queen in the midst of them, attended by her guard. Row upon row of bees surround the sealed cells, the last row forming the envelope, as it were; and when these feel the cold stealing over them, they creep into the crowd, and others at once take their places. The whole cluster hangs suspended, clinging on to each other; rising and falling as the cells are gradually emptied of their store of honey. For, contrary to what is generally believed, the life of the bee does not cease in winter; it merely becomes less active. These little lovers of sunshine contrive, through a constant and simultaneous beating of their wings, to maintain in their hive a degree of warmth that shall equal that of a day in spring. And they owe this to the honey, which is itself no more than a ray of heat which has passed through their bodies, and now gives its generous blood to the hive. The bees that are nearest the cells pass it on to their neighbors, and these in their turn to those next them. Thus it goes from mouth to mouth through the crowd, till it reaches those furthest away. And this honey, this essence of sunshine and flowers, circulates through the hive until such time as the sun itself, the glorious sun of the spring, shall thrust in its beam through the half-open door, and tell of the violets and anemones that are once more coming to life. The workers will wake, and discover that the sky again is blue in the world, and that the wheel of life has turned, and begun afresh.