Watchingthe inner life of the hive in the season of its full activity, it is not the untiring spirit of industry pervading the whole bee-commonwealth that most excites the student’s wonder, but rather the fact that this ceaseless diligence finds so many outlets—that so many different kinds of necessary work are going forward at one and the same time.
Between the brood-combs the nurses are feeding the young larvæ, or clearing out the empty cells, or sealing over the full-grown nymphs for their pre-natal slumber. Hard by, the sowers are at their vital work, driving their living seed-barrow, the queen, over the combs. Elsewhere the wax-makers hang in a silent, densely packed cluster. Overhead, the new honey-combs are growing; the masons building up the cell-walls, while the engineers devise means and ends, calculate strains, put in a strut here, a stay there, or flying buttress from one comb to another, or cut newpassageways where the traffic seems too congested for the old thoroughfares of the hive.
On all sides the scavenging bees go to and fro, picking up every particle of refuse, and carrying it safely away. Winged undertakers drive their trade in the midst of the throng, bearing the corpses of their comrades, old and young, towards the entrance, and flying away with them into the sunlight of the young spring day. There is the ventilating army outside the city gates, skilfully organised in relays, so that, day and night, a constant circulation of air is maintained. There are the guard-bees close by, watching all in-comers and out-goers. There is a sort of General Purposes Committee ready outside the threshold with a helping hand for all: succouring the overladen, grooming down any in need of such assistance, gathering up fallen treasure, or, as it would seem, taking careful note of the weather for their next official report. And all through the hours of sunshine, in unnumbered thousands, the foragers are charging to and fro, some bringing nectar, some staggering in under mighty loads of pollen, others with full water-sacs, still more dragging behind them lumps of the curious cement called by the ancients Propolis, and used for so many different purposes in the daily work of the hive.
The honey-bee (enlarged) from life: and as some ancient draughtsmen depicted them
And it all goes on with the regularity of a well ordered human settlement. There is complexity, yet no confusion; there is speed without hurry Each busy gang of labourers has apparently a distinct and definite task allotted to it by the central hive-authority; co-operation and progress are, to all appearances, deified cause and effect in all the affairs of the hive.
It is easy—nay, inevitable—in any close study of bee-life with the help of the modern observation-hive, to overset the ancient idea of absolute bee-monarchy under a single king or queen. But it is not so easy to determine how the general government of the colony is actually carried on. Innumerable small consultations on minor matters are seen to take place on every side during each moment of the busy day; but nothing like general communication is ever visible. And yet, how are the great national movements, such as the despatch of a swarm or the supersedure of an old queen, brought about; how are the various common crises of the State met, and provided for? The only rational inference seems to be that each worker is in herself the perfect evolved presentment of republicanism, in whom all imaginable difficulties in collective life have their best solution, tried and proved through the ages, and resorted to unerringly as a matter of course. Thus a common need is felt, and met instantaneously by a common, recognised expedient. The judgment of one is necessarily the judgment of all. Every problem of daily life, however intricate, is solved by the one device, brought to the fine point of perfectionthrough the experience of countless generations, and applied by each individual to the common want, just as hunger impels all mankind to eat.
Such a condition of affairs, even in a community of human beings, would imply a very high state of mental, if not of moral, development in the individual. It would mean entire negation of self in the interest of the common good. Even with all the forces of heredity at work, it would need stern ascetic training for the young, and for the transgressing adult a swift and merciless retribution, if the last dream of communism—the abolition of all law and penalty, and the establishment of a natural autonomy of well-doing—were ever to be realised in fact. And yet some such state of things appears to exist in the bee-commonwealth: the individual worker-bee seems to be the product of some such system carried on through an indefinite space of time. Order is preserved, public works go diligently forward, the clock of the national progress keeps time to the second, not because there is a central wisdom-force to plan, to govern, to awe recalcitrants, but because every worker-bee is herself the State in miniature, all propensities alien to the pure collective spirit having been long ago bred out of her by the sheer necessities of her case.
The worker-bee, as we see her in the hive to-day, although evolution must have been busy through the ages determining her present mind-power and bodily conformation, is nevertheless asmuch a product of direct artifice as she is of original nature. We have seen how the egg containing the feminine germ, if given full scope and opportunity, develops into what may be taken as the complete aboriginal type of female bee, differing from the worker in a dozen essential ways. The queen also is probably, in one respect at least—her amazing fecundity—a deliberate creation of the hive-people, as her over-production is brought about by over-stimulation to meet an artificial state of affairs. Left to herself, under pristine conditions, she would certainly lay on a much more moderate scale. But the worker-bee owes her unique structure and mental constitution almost entirely to the intervention of her nurses from the moment of the hatching of the egg. Careful experiment has proved that the queen-larva and the worker-larva are identical up to the third day of their life in the cell, except that the queen has made more rapid growth owing to more generous and more ample fare. After the third day, the genital system of each larva will begin to develop, if this rich nitrogenous diet is maintained. In the case of the queen, this pre-digested food, well called bee-milk, is lavished on the favoured grub up to the last moment of its larval existence, no other food being given. But in the case of the worker-grub, not only has its supply of bee-milk been restricted in both quantity and quality from the day of its birth, but now—just before thedevelopment of the ovaries might be expected—an important change is made. The allowance of bee milk is greatly reduced, while plain honey is given in addition, but on the same parsimonious scale, to the end of its five days’ larval life.
What other influences, if any, are brought to bear on the young worker-bee at this portentous stage of her career, it is impossible to say. But at least the change in the food is well ascertained, and the results—whether of this alone, or in combination with other treatment—are more than astounding. Not only is the development of the sex-organs so completely arrested that hardly a trace of them can be discovered in the adult worker-bee, but, from that moment, the larva seems to become an essentially different creature, reflecting more and more the attributes of her nurses, and showing wider and wider departure from those of the mother-bee. As soon as the worker changes into the pupa state, organs appear of which the queen has not the faintest rudiments. She receives her special equipment for field-work in a pair of baskets for carrying pollen. Her tongue is lengthened, so that it may reach the nectar hidden deep down in the clover-bells. She is to become a builder, and therefore is provided with half a dozen crucibles wherein to prepare the wax. Her useless ovipositor is changed into a weapon: it is straightened, shortened; the barbs upon it are multiplied and strengthened; a gland,with which it is furnished, and which, in the queen, contains an all but harmless fluid, is now filled with an active poison. Above all, she develops a brain-power far in excess of that of the normal female bee, her mother; and she acquires a whole new set of impulses and aspirations from beginning to end.
While the queen-bee’s natural element is the obscurity of the hive, and she would seem both to hate and fear the sunshine, the worker is essentially an outdoor creature, revelling in the light and air. While the queen, though obedient to the destiny that has made her over-fruitful, displays nevertheless not the slightest joy of motherhood nor interest in her children, the worker, doomed to eternal spinsterhood, yet constitutes herself the true mother and nurse and instructress of all the young in the hive. And the price exacted for the authority and power which she usurps, or was usurped for her by those remote ancestors of hers who first invented the sexless honey-bee, must be paid in the hardest coin—that of life itself. Instead of the years that nature allotted to her kind in the beginning, she is to endure hardly as many months. Destiny, and her own vaulting ambitions, have given her too arduous a part to play. Her stunted, yet over-elaborated body and over-developed brain, cannot long hold out against the wear and tear of the life she is born to. At best a few months see her dead at her work, orusing the last pulsations of her worn-out, ragged wings to carry her away to the traditional burial-place of the hive; or her end may be to fall under the stroke of the State executioners. For the old-age problem has long ago discovered its effective solution in the bee-republic. Justice that is capable of being tempered with mercy carries its own mark of imperfection indelibly upon it. When the principle of all for the common good has been driven to its last resort in logic, mercy to the individual can only be another name for robbing Peter to pay Paul. In bee-communism the sole title to life is utility, and so the old worn-out, useless workers must go.
The development of the worker-egg through its various stages of growth, until the perfectly formed insect emerges from the cell, makes a curious study. The egg itself is remarkable, for it is covered with an hexagonal pattern. The large compound eyes of the fully grown bee also show this form. Each eye consists of about four thousand separate lenses, and each lens is a regular hexagon. Wonder has often been expressed at the ingenuity of the comb-builders in making the cells six-sided, and thus crowding into a given space more compartments than could be secured by the same amount of material wrought into any other shape. The ancient writers explained this choice of the hexagonal cell by the supposed fact that the six legs of the bee were simultaneouslyemployed in comb-building, each leg constructing its own portion of the cell. A more modern idea is that the particular shape of the cell is accidental, or rather the outcome of compelling circumstance, mutual pressure causing the cells to assume the hexagonal form.
Now, it is quite true that soaked peas in a bottle will take this shape in swelling, but the analogy will not hold good in respect of comb-building. In the work of the bees there is no pressure or constriction of any kind. Each cell is made separately, being joined on to those above it; and the comb expands steadily downward and sideways through an empty space until the desired limit is reached. A much more probable explanation of the hexagonal form of the cell is that it was arrived at by experience. The first combs may have been built with round cells, the interstices being filled in with wax. But the bee, who is an expert in the science of economy, would quickly see the disadvantage of this plan. And with the hexagonal principle, an old familiar thing in the hive—witness the pattern on the egg-surfaces, and the compound eye-construction—it would not be long before she hit upon the better, more scientific way.
There is, however, another reason, and almost as potent a one, for the adoption of the six-sided cell both for brood-raising and the storing of honey. It must be remembered that the presentsystem of vertical walls parallel and close together, made up of numberless small horizontal chambers placed back to back, is not an ideal arrangement either for the raising of the young or the storing of food. Yet it is the best possible contrivance under the circumstances, which are forced upon the bee by the necessity of leading a close, crowded, communal life. Air is a prime need for all operations in the hive, but for none more than the development of the young bees. When a queen is to be raised, a full supply of fresh air is given her, but only at the expense of valuable space. With the common kind, of which perhaps ten or fifteen thousand may be maturing in the brood-nest at one and the same time, it is obviously impossible to make any such concession. The young worker- or drone-larva must secure what air it can through the narrow cell-top. Now, the bee breathes at all stages of its career not through the mouth, but by means of air-holes or spiracles in the sides of its body. If the cell were round, the larva, when fairly grown, would fill the space, and the air would reach the spiracles only with difficulty. But, no matter what the size of the young grub may be, the angles of the hexagon cell are never quite filled. They form half a dozen by-passes for the air, arranged on all sides, and extending right to the base of the cell; and thus the larva has the full benefit of the available air-supply, even though it be necessarily scanty.
With the store-combs the six angles of the cell fulfil an equally important office. The ideal honey-cell would be one with its mouth opening upwards, so that it could be filled in an ordinary rational way. But under the strict economical principles ruling in the hive such an arrangement would be impracticable. The honey-vats must be stacked one over the other in a horizontal position, and therefore must be chargeable from the end. All cells in the comb have a slight upward tilt, but not enough to retain the fluid contents if the cell were a round one. The effect of the angles in the hexagon is to increase the retentive property of the cell, and experience has taught the bees how to supplement this natural holding power of the angles by just that slight cant of the cell which is necessary to prevent the nectar running out.
The worker-bee, during her period of larval life, at first lies coiled up at the bottom of the cell, but as her size increases she takes up a position lengthways, with her head towards the cell-mouth. This, however, is not a constant attitude, for she seems at intervals to make a series of slow gyrations or somersaults, probably to facilitate the casting of her skin, which she accomplishes several times during her five days’ life as a grub. At the end of this time the nurse-bees stop the feeding process and seal up the cell. Now the larva sets to work, first to spin herself a silken shroud before entering on her long sleep as a chrysalis, and thento change her skin for the last time. In the case of the worker these fine-wrought sleeping-clothes envelop her whole body, forming a continuous cocoon. But the queen-larva weaves herself only a scanty sort of cloak, covering her head and thorax, but leaving her nether portions bare. The theory usually advanced in explanation of this is, that when the surplus queens are slaughtered in their cells by the accepted mother-bee after her fertilisation, the fell work is rendered easier by the absence of the tough material of the cocoon over the parts generally attacked. It seems to be well substantiated that in a battle of queens the stings are not used haphazard, as with the workers, but each queen tries to thrust her weapon into one of her enemy’s spiracles or breathing-holes, of which she possesses fourteen, seven on each side. And a stroke dealt in this way appears to be always fatal.
But, in all likelihood, the true reason why the queen sleeps in a short gown made of tough, coarse fibre must be looked for somewhere back in the old ancestral history of the honey-bee. It is probably safe to consider the complete worker cocoon as a comparatively recent introduction, evolved to meet some necessity arising since the bee-people became a civilised race. But what its true origin was appears to be out of the reach of all conjecture. A curious fact is that these cocoons are never removed from the cell. They remainfixed to its sides throughout, and though the cell is otherwise carefully cleaned after the young bee has vacated it, the cocoon is never interfered with, but continues as a permanent lining to the cell. The same thing occurs with all successive generations, each bee leaving her swaddling-clothes behind her, until so great an accumulation occurs that the cell becomes too small for breeding any but a puny, undersized race. With wild bees, where the nest has been constructed in a tree-hollow, and there is usually plenty of surplus room, the old brood-combs may be eventually abandoned and fresh ones built farther on. Thus the stock generally shifts its station from year to year. These natural bee-nests, or bee-bikes, as country people call them, often reach a great age. Sometimes a swarm will get under the rafters in a house-roof, and may be left undisturbed for generations. In one case bees were traditionally supposed to have inhabited a blind loft in a farmhouse continuously for forty or fifty years. A legend rife in the village credited them with having stored many tons of honey, but when the stock was sulphured little more than a vast accumulation of comb was discovered. This comb was of all ages, from a few weeks old to an unconjecturable number of years. Much of it was perfectly black, and the cells choked up with pupa cocoons.
The fact that egg-laying is continued in thesecombs where others are not available, even though the capacity of the cells has been greatly reduced, seems to cast an added doubt on the theory that the size of the cell is responsible for the fertilisation or non-fertilisation of the egg as it is deposited by the queen. Very old drone-comb is sometimes found in use for breeding purposes where the cells have become no larger than those used for normal worker-brood. And yet the queen continues to lay in them unimpregnated eggs. The whole question is still hedged round with difficulties.
The young worker-bee, at the end of about three weeks from its first inception, breaks from its chrysalis-skin, and begins to gnaw its way through the cell-cover. The pollen, which is combined with the wax to form this capping, discharges a double office. It makes the wax porous for the admittance of air, and it renders the cell-cover edible, thus causing the young bee to effect its own release through the promptings of its appetite. The new-born worker, although fully grown, is a weak, greyish-hued, flaccid creature for some time after it leaves its cradle. Its earliest impulse seems to be to groom itself, and then to wander about on a tour of inspection of its as yet narrow world of gloom and noise and bustle. For the first day or two it does little else than crawl about unnoticed in the busy throng, gradually gaining strength and rigidity of limb.
Brood-comb, showing eggs, larvæ in different stages of growth, sealed cells, and young bees cutting their way out
On the second day it may be seen dipping into the open honey-vats and pollen-bins, of which a few are always scattered here and there among the brood-cells. After this it seems to waken in earnest to its duties and responsibilities, and takes its place among the nurse-bees, setting to work with the rest in the stupendous task of feeding the larvæ.
In the ordinary course, the young worker-bee will not leave the hive for about a fortnight after its emergence from the cell. In the interval, however, it has a whole policy of life to study, and several trades to learn. All the indoor work of the hive appears to be done by the young bees during these first weeks of their existence. On them the whole care and sustenance of the young brood depend. They produce the wax, and build the combs; they look after the order and cleanliness of the hive; they are the brewers of the honey, and the keepers of the stores; they feed the queen-bee on her ceaseless rounds, and also give the drones their daily rations of bee-milk, for it is certain that the male bees depend very largely on the workers in this way, drawing only a part of their diet from the common stores. The old bees are the foragers; but it is probable they are met by the younger ones soon after their return to the hive, and their burden of nectar, being regurgitated, is transferred to the pouches of the young bees, by whom it is carried to the store-combs in the upper regions of the hive. At least, if thestorage-chamber of a hive be opened during the busy part of the day, hardly any old bees will be seen among the crowd, which is industriously filling the cells with the new-gathered sweets.
It is not until the beginning of the second week of their life that the young bees make their first essay in the open air, and then it is only for a few minutes during the hottest part of the day. This sudden midday uproar is a familiar experience to the bee-keeper during the late spring and summer; and although the drones at first contribute largely to the chorus, they soon fly away, while the singing cloud of bees which remains enveloping every hive at this time, is entirely composed of the young house-bees taking their daily brief allowance of exercise and air.
It is found that the glands necessary for the production of the brood-food, as also the wax-generating organs, are largely developed in bees only a few weeks old, while, after their first month of life is over, these organs are greatly reduced. The bee generally begins outdoor work as a forager soon after she has reached the age of fourteen days. It is, however, probably a week or two longer before she attempts the more serious business of nectar-gathering. Nearly all the pollen-bearers are bees in their first young strength and vigour, and therefore peculiarly adapted to the carrying of heavy burdens. But as soon as the worker-bee has settled down to the greatparamount task of honey-getting, she seems to leave the pollen alone. Thus, in a normal colony, the life of the honey-bee, short as it is, is carefully planned out from beginning to end, each period having its special task for which the age of the bee is peculiarly fitted. Yet this rule is no more absolute than any other of the ways of the hive. Where the community is short-handed, and there are not enough mature workers to gather stores, the young bees will be turned out to forage at a much earlier date in their career. In the same way, if a hive has been without a queen for some time, and therefore few young bees are available to care for the brood when the new mother-bee has at last established herself, many of the old workers will stay at home and busy themselves with the nursery-work, which in the ordinary course they would have long since relinquished.
There are many such instances of ingenious makeshift, or special adaptation, in the ways of the honey-bee. She is a creature full of resource on emergencies, but it is in the provision of desperate remedies for really desperate ills that she shines at her brightest. The prime disaster in bee-life is the loss of a queen at a time when it is impossible to appoint a successor. The standard of intelligence, as well as that of character, varies among bees almost as much as it does among men. Some colonies will work harder and for longer hours than the rest. Others will ease offwhen they have put by what they consider a sufficiency of stores, and an idle spirit spreads visibly among them. In a few cases there is a distinct moral twist in the national character, and the bees take to robbing their neighbours’ larders instead of working to furnish their own.
Permanent queenlessness is a calamity which affects different colonies in different ways. With some it means complete despair, a cessation of all enterprise or interest in life. Work is stopped; the guards are withdrawn from the gate; the community seems to give up in a body, and to await extinction with no more hope than a batch of criminals in the condemned cell. But with others the common disaster is but a signal for a universal quickening of wits, a furbishing-up of all possible and impossible resources. To bees of this temper we should look for such episodes as the egg-purloining to supply a queen-cell, which has been already dealt with. But for supreme ingenuity, even though it be the forlornest of forlorn hopes, perhaps there is nothing to equal a device sometimes resorted to in this last emergency.
Looking through a hive which is not only without a queen, but which is without any means of raising one, certain mysterious eggs are unexpectedly discovered. These eggs are obviously quite newly laid, but not in the orthodox way. A normal queen works consistently from cell to cell, over a fairly regular patch of comb, anddeposits only one egg in each cell; but these eggs in the queenless hive have been laid in a curiously haphazard way. The eggs are straggled over the comb. Two or three cells have been furnished at one spot and a few more at another, without the slightest attempt at the usual order and system. Moreover, some cells contain single eggs, but others two, or even three, apiece. It looks as if some demented mother-bee from another hive had caught her keepers napping, and had made surreptitious excursion into the queenless stock. But the most careful search through the hive will reveal no queen, nor is one to be found. The explanation of the vagary is that one of the workers has, in some extraordinary way, succeeded in rousing her atrophied nature, and has become capable of laying eggs. Yet the doom of the colony is not delayed by this, but rather hastened; for these eggs will produce only drones, and thus still more useless mouths to feed. In one well-authenticated case, the bees of a queenless colony built a queen-cell, and actually transplanted to it one of these eggs laid by a fertile worker, a dead drone being afterwards found in the cell.
How the laying worker is produced under the spur of the national crisis can only be a matter for speculation, but probably the youngest bee of the colony is plied with the special food usually given to queens, and thus her generative faculties are, to a certain extent, developed.
Themodern commercial bee-keeper—the man who keeps his bees in hives of the most approved construction, all alike in colour and shape, and all in straight rows—is too prone to look only on the practical side of his work, and to regard with a certain ill-concealed contempt anything that does not directly promote what is, in his view, the one and only object of apiculture, that of honey-getting.
But with the bee-keeper who is also a bee-lover, the tendency is all the other way. To live in the very spirit of wonder, as he must who has once dipped down below the surface of hive-life, is to saddle but a slow, ambling jade for the race in material prosperity. In a bee-garden the habit of rumination comes on one like creeping paralysis, gradually but irresistibly. It is one thing, on a fine June morning, to start away from the house, pipe in mouth and busily trundling the honey-barrow, intent on a long day’s work among the hives; it is quite another thing to keepindustriously to the task hour after hour, when the sun has fixed his slothful golden grip upon you, and the drowsy song of the bees has worked its will on heart and mind.
Good resolutions have a way of petering out, reasonably enough, under these inviting circumstances. The honey-barrow makes the most comfortable seat in the world, and can be pulled up just where the shade of the linden-trees is thickest. Moreover, the blue smoke of tobacco, drifting lazily up through the sunshine, adds just that touch of deliberation needed in a scene where all is unmitigated, almost desperate toil; while what difference can it make if one alone be idle in the hundred thousand? And so, as often as not, the creaking wheel comes permanently to rest under the lindens; the honey is left to the honey-makers; the thoughts follow the bees into their hives, or may-be wend away over seas to the great plantations, where the dry weed filling the pipe-bowl was once a green leaf in an ocean of green, flecked over with blossom, and sung over by bees, whose ancestors might have come from this very nook in old England, where it is now all ending in smoke and quiet thought.
But, especially on rainy days, when there is much to do indoors—preparing the section-racks, discharging the honey from the full combs that, empty, they may be returned to the hives for refilling on the morrow, and what not—the tendencyto set aside obvious, humdrum duties in beemanship has a still more capable ally.
The beeman with a microscope has given the seven-leagued boots to his conscience; he will never catch up with it again in a whole life’s march. If the daily work in the hive, as seen with the naked eye, is a fascinating, duty-dispersing study, a microscopic acquaintance with the hive-worker herself, and the details of her extraordinary equipment, lets one into a whole new world of fact and thought.
It is only under a strong glass that the true place of the honey-bee in the scale of creation can be entirely estimated. Her work is evident to the most casual eye, but of the worker herself we get only a vague idea of a dim-hued, crystal-winged atom running a perpetual race with the wind and sunshine, or forming an all but undistinguishable speck in the seething, heaving multitudes within the hive.
But here, on the stage of the microscope, the honey-bee is revealed as a totally new creature; and, by little and little, a story unfolds itself about her which, in its way, is a perfect epic of life. No one can study the perplexities of hive-life for long without a conviction that a creature executing such varied and elaborate works must, of necessity, be herself highly developed in body and mind. But it seldom happens, even with the veriest tiro, that the expectation comes anywhere near thereality in such an examination of the common worker-bee. The unaided eye sees a creature, fashioned simply enough to all appearances—a brown, attenuated body, two pairs of wings, the usual six legs common to all insects, and a couple of bent horns, like threshels, that continuously waver to and fro. But under the glass this simplicity at once vanishes. From the tip of her antennæ to the barbed end of her sting, there is nothing about the honey-bee that is not made on the most bewilderingly, complicated plan.
Watching a hive at work on a busy day in summer, the attention is first drawn to the pollen-gatherers, labouring in by the thousand with the big, oval, brightly-coloured masses fixed to their hindmost legs; and it is first to the pollen-carrying organism that the glass is now naturally directed. The six legs, which looked all very much alike to the naked eye, are seen to be in three pairs, and the construction of each pair differs very markedly from that of its fellows. So far from their being simple legs, each has no fewer than nine jointed parts, and nearly every part carries a special piece of mechanism necessary and vital in the daily work of the bee. Whole treatises might be written on the functions of the human hand, yet the hand is a very simple contrivance compared with the legs of the honey-bee. The pollen-carrying device is on the thigh of the hind leg. The thigh is broadened out and hollowed, andround this oblong cavity is a fringe of incurving bristles which look as if they would hold anything. But before the pollen can be packed in these baskets it must be collected and kneaded together. Practically the whole body of the bee is used in pollen-gathering. Under the low power of the microscope it is seen that hardly any part of the trunk or limb is without its dense covering of hairs; but with the high objective these hairs cease to be hairs, and are changed into actual feathers, delicate herring-bone implements, which sweep up the pollen as the bee dives into the flower-cup for the nectar that lies below.
Nearly every joint of each leg is furnished with a comb of bristles, with which this pollen-dust is scraped off and transferred to the carrying-basket after being moistened by the tongue; while the hind-legs have each a complete, perfectly-fashioned curry-comb. Here the leg is widened and flattened, and covered on one side with nine or ten rows of short, strong spines, with which the bee scrapes her body just as a groom curry-combs a horse. At ordinary times she will carefully pack her load of pollen into its proper receptacles before returning to the hive, so that it shall be all ready for transference to the cells. At the cell-mouth she pushes each lump off by means of her other legs, leaving it to be rammed down into the cell by the store-keepers. No distinction is made here, every kind and colour of pollen beingindiscriminately stored in the same cell; and when the cell is full, a thin layer of honey is smeared over all, to preserve it from the air. When, however, time presses, the bee will not stop to knead up the load, but will carry it home as it is, arriving in the hive smothered completely from head to foot as with gold-dust. Then the house-bees gather round her, soon scraping her free of her encumbrance, and she starts off again for another load.
The fact that insects can walk on both upper and under surfaces apparently with equal ease, is none the less remarkable because we see it going on every day of our lives. Yet the fly, crawling up the window-glass, or running about on the ceiling, owes his power of topsy-turvy perambulation to a very ingenious device. This is well illustrated in the foot of a bee. She has a pair of short, strong double claws, which will take her securely over all but the smoothest and shiniest surfaces; and it is with these claws that bees form themselves into dense clusters and knots and cables within the hive, holding hand-to-hand, as it were, in all directions. But when there is nothing for the claw to hold by, another part of the foot comes into play. This is a soft, flexible pad, which is always covered by a thick, oily exudation. In walking, the bee puts her feet down three at a time, the pads adhering instantly they come into contact with the smooth surface. At the next step the other three pads come into play, while the first three arestripped off. But each foot is capable of attaching and detaching itself independently of its fellows. In this case the stripping is accomplished by downward pressure of the claws of the same foot.
On each of her fore-legs the bee has an appliance which fulfils a very important office. It is a semicircular notch with a fringe of strong hairs, and when the leg is bent up, this notch engages with a curious projection on the next upper joint, forming an eyelet roughly circular in shape. With this exact and special tool she cleans her antennæ, and this is done at short intervals throughout the whole active time of her life, much as, in the operation of winking, the human eye is kept cleansed. The tongue also is freed from adhering grains of pollen by this device.
The question, How does a bee gather the flower-juices to make her honey? is met by certain popular naturalists with the assurance that she sucks them through a tube. This is so easy a generalisation that it amounts very nearly to positive error. The tongue of the bee is not a tube, as the word is usually understood. And she laps up the nectar as often as she sucks it. It depends entirely on the quantity to be dealt with; and a little careful dissection of the mouth-parts of the bee, by means of the microscope and a pair of long needles, will soon make the whole matter clear.
She is no beauty—the honey-bee, seen at such close quarters; unending toil, and a perverted,baffled nature, do not tend to loveliness in any of her sex. But her positive and almost terrifying ugliness, when looked at so disadvantageously, is soon forgotten as one comes to realise her abounding possession of that other kind of beauty—the beauty of utility.
To the naked eye her tongue is a bright brown, shining piece, protruding from her mouth, and hanging down with much the same appearance as an elephant’s trunk. Under the microscope it is soon seen that this is not a tongue in the proper sense, but a continuation of the under-lip. It consists of six or seven different parts capable of being fitted together lengthways. There is a central part, longer than the rest, with a hairy spatula at its end, and when the other parts are closed about this, the whole virtually forms a tube within a tube. The spatula does the lapping when only minute quantities of fluid have to be taken up, and these pass into the mouth more by capillary attraction than by actual sucking; but when there is a brimming cup of nectar to be emptied, the whole mechanism of the tongue is brought into play. The longitudinal strips are placed together edge to edge, and the liquid is drawn out of the flower-cup by the action of the tongue-muscles in much the same way as water is lifted by a pump.
Now that we have the head of the bee under observation, many curious things about it can beascertained. The strong, curved jaws, working sideways, are doubly interesting as the main implements used in the preparation of the wax, and largely in the comb-building. But the eyes and the long, flail-like antenna rivet attention first. Whether the bee was made for her life, or the life—imposed on her by inexorable conditions—made the bee what she is to-day, the extraordinary adaptation of her physique to her environment is beyond all question. The great compound eyes, with their thousands of facets each pointing in a slightly different direction, are obviously made for wide and distant outlooks. It is with these eyes that the bee finds her way out and home over miles of country. In the worker the compound eyes occupy the whole sides of the head, but in the drone they are much larger, and meet entirely at the top. Thus, dallying in the sunshine, he is able the while to keep the whole arc of the sky under scrutiny, ready at an instant’s notice to take up the love-challenge of the young queens.
But these large multiple eyes of the bee are of little use to her at close quarters, or in the deep twilight of the hive. For indoor use, and for near vision, she has three other eyes, containing a single lens each, and set in her forehead just above her antennæ. The popular belief, that the honey-bee carries on her busy life, and elaborate enterprises in complete darkness, is mainly afallacy. Probably there is always some light, even in the remotest recesses of the hive—enough, at least, for the eyes of the bee, if not for our own vision.
The bee, however, would seem to depend very little on sight alone in the prosecution of her various tasks. There is little doubt that she possesses all the other four senses in a marked degree. Both the tongue and the lips have certain highly developed structures upon them which can be nothing else than organs of taste; while the most superficial acquaintance with the life of the hive must convince anyone that the bee possesses the senses of smell and hearing, and that very acutely. Where the seat of these two faculties lies is at present doubtful, and the exact functions of the antennæ are still a matter of conjecture. But it is at least certain that these latter perform vital office in every act or enterprise of the bee. It is obvious that the antennæ are very delicate organs of touch, but it is equally obvious that they are much more than this. It has been ascertained that they carry no less than six totally different kinds of instruments, each of which must have its distinct use.
Observation of the ways of the honey-bee has been carried on for thousands of years. More books have been written about the bee than perhaps of all other creatures put together. And yet our knowledge of her powers and organisation must stillbe reckoned in its infancy. The microscopists have dissected her antenna and isolated all their various parts, but of the particular functions of these little or nothing is known at present. There are certain hairs, evenly distributed over the whole surface, which are presumably instruments of touch. But there are other hairs, or fine cones, which are hollow, enclosing a delicate nerve-fibre; hairs set loosely in a cavity; hairs curved and ringed, and of different lengths. Then there are mysterious pits and depressions, either open or covered with incredibly thin membranes, enshrining nerve-ends only just visible with the highest objectives. And the whole is linked up in an intricate nervous system that baffles every art and patience of research; while, when all has been investigated and described, no one is really any the wiser.
The antenna are certainly touch-organs, and, in all likelihood, it is by their means that the bee hears and smells. Yet this only exhausts a few of their manifest possibilities. It is quite clear that we must admit the honey-bee to possess other senses than the five we know of; and—for a guess—some of these mysterious implements on her antenna may be thought-transmitters and -receivers on the wireless plan. The wonderful unanimity of action among bees may be due to the fact that they can exchange ideas through the air, as men have now at last come to do. Thefaculty of speech, hitherto held up as man’s insignia of lordship over the rest of creation, may be indeed a crude, archaic thing, compared with the mind-language of the honey-bees.
There is another conceivable function which the antennæ of bees may perform—that of unerring and instant estimation of short distances. They may be delicate measuring instruments, not mechanically applied in the way of a foot-rule or metric scale, but registering dimensions inherently, as our ears record intensity of sound. This would go far to explain how honeycomb is built, how the cells are made all of the same shape and size, although hundreds of the mason-bees are at work on the structure, not only at the same moment, but in succession, each bee coming and going in the murmurous gloom of the hive, and beginning instantly and unhesitatingly at the point where her predecessor broke off. As the central division of the comb grew, expanding in all directions downward, and the cells were built out horizontally at the same time, the bee would know by her sense of dimension when the limit of each side in the hexagonal cell-base was reached, and would know the proper angle to turn off at in the laying of the next foundation-line.
Anyone who has watched the flight of the bee must have been struck by its sheer facility and freedom no less than by its speed. It is quite evident that the bee is not only an accomplishedaërial navigator, but that she sustains and propels herself through the air with very little effort. Obviously her equipment for flight must be a thoroughly efficient one, and yet at first glance it is not quite clear how she manages so well. The student of the flight-problem, taking his ideas and conception of first principles from the flight of birds, is accustomed to believe that there are at least two vital indispensable elements in the process—a pair of wings or combination of aëroplane and propellers that will sustain as well as drive, and some sort of steering-apparatus like the bird’s tail. Yet, as far as a first general inspection carries us, the bee appears to have no rudder-mechanism at all, but to depend on her four wings for every purpose. The wings of the bird have a variable action. They can be used together or separately, and are as capable of eccentric adjustment, both in themselves and in relation to one another, as a pair of human arms. But the bee’s wings have none of this adaptability. They have but the one motion, up and down; and they work symmetrically, each wing keeping time with its fellow. Yet the bee steers herself perfectly well in a hundred different evolutions, accomplishing all that the bird attains with his more complicated apparatus for flight.
The whole problem is bound up with another problem; and the two, difficult of solution apart, easily resolve one another when taken inconjunction. Insects are so called because their bodies are in two parts, entirely divided except for an extremely slender connecting joint. We are so accustomed to accept this arrangement as a common fact in nature that we seldom stop to consider its real significance. It is not easy to see how such a construction can be anything else than a drawback to any living creature. But in the hive-bee the whole arrangement seems to amount to what must be called an ideal inconvenience, seeing that her honey-sac and complicated organs for producing the larval food are in her abdomen, with no way to them but through this fine joint. Clearly there is some weighty reason for it, out-balancing all other considerations, or it would not exist; and when we come to study it in connection with the honey-bee’s peculiar system of flight, we soon arrive at the true solution.
It has been said that the wings of the bee have a perfectly symmetrical action, and that they have a single fixed direction, moving up and down, always at right-angles with the line of the thorax. Under the microscope each of the four wings is seen as a transparent, impervious membrane, intersected with fine ribs. The front wing, however, has a much stronger and stiffer rib running the entire length of its upper edge, and it is on this main rib that almost the entire force of the flight-muscles is concentrated. If you look farther, you will see that the under wing has a row of finehooks along its top edge, while the lower edge of the upper wing is flanged or folded back. In flight the hooks on one wing engage with the flange on the other, and thus the wings on each side are automatically locked together, forming one continuous air-resisting surface. This combined wing is very flexible throughout, except at its upper edge, where it is stiffened by the main rib. In action, therefore,—the force being applied practically to the edge alone, which resists the air while the rest of the wing bends to it—the result is that the whole wing becomes an oscillating, inclined plane, whose inclination, forward on the down-stroke, is still forward on the up-stroke, because the plane-inclination reverses itself automatically.
From this it will be understood how the flexible wings of the bee are used in straightforward flight; but, seeing that the wings themselves are incapable of independent or irregular action, it is not yet clear how the bee contrives to steer herself, rising or descending, or turning sideways, just as the mood seizes her. It is here that the reason for the peculiar construction of her body becomes plain. The fine link which unites her abdomen to her thorax is really an universal joint, actuated by a series of powerful cross-muscles, and the bee steers herself through the air by using the weight of the lower half of her body as a counterpoise. By swinging her heavy abdomen forward orbackward, or from side to side, she changes her centre of gravity, and the line of force of her aëroplanes, at one and the same time. Actually her body keeps its vertical position, being her heaviest part, and it is the lighter wing-supporting thorax which is deflected. But the result is the same, and every variety and direction of flight is accomplished by the bee on what seems a far more simple plan than that evidenced in the flight of birds.
One of the most difficult things to account for in the life of the honey-bee is the fact that the temperature of the hive can be varied at the will of its occupants. The system of mechanical ventilation will, of course, explain how the hive is kept cool in the greatest heats of summer, but it does not explain the sudden accessions of heat to which it is liable from time to time. These occur principally when the wax is being generated. Under the bronze armour-plates of her body the worker-bee has six shallow, but broad depressions, beneath which the wax-glands are placed. Perfect rest and a high temperature seem to be necessary for the stimulation of these glands, and the wax-makers consume a large quantity of sweet-food during the process. It is generally stated that bees fill themselves from the stores of mature honey before uniting in the cluster; but it is more probable that the food consumed during wax-making is principally the nectar, almost as gathered from the flowers. This view is confirmed bycertain experiments which were undertaken to decide the amount of food assimilated during the production of a given weight of wax. When the bees had access only to honey, it was found that five or six pounds were needed during the time that one pound of wax was produced. But if the bees were fed on a plain syrup of cane-sugar, more wax was generated. The chemical composition of fresh nectar is almost identical with that of sugar from the sugar-cane, but mature honey contains practically no cane-sugar at all. It is very doubtful, therefore, if the economic bee would deplete her hard-won stores of honey for a purpose that could be better accomplished in another and cheaper way. And it should also be borne in mind that the natural time for comb-building coincides with the season when nectar is in greatest plenty.
These sudden variations in temperature appear to be brought about by a wholesale increase in the rate of respiration among the bees; and there is nothing that excites the wonder of the student of hive-life more than the breathing-apparatus of the bee, as seen under the microscope. Practically her whole physical system is directly supplied with air, drawn in through her many spiracles. As far as scientists have been able to determine, there is not a fibre or nerve in her entire body that is not reached by the minute ramifications of the air-ducts, in direct communication with the great main breathing-vessels in the bee’s abdomen.Respiration appears to be largely voluntary with the honey-bee. She breathes only when the necessity for it arises, and will sometimes arrest the action entirely for three or four minutes together. But when the wax-making is going forward, or swarming-time is near at hand, the quick, vibratory movement of respiration is visible everywhere in the throng of bees, and the temperature of the hive climbs up often to a dozen degrees above its normal point.
The breathing system of the honey-bee is closely connected with her sound-organs. Anyone asked to describe the note made by a bee would probably say that she hums or buzzes, and there would be an end to most ideas on the matter. But to the beeman this is a pitifully inadequate statement of the truth. The bee comprises in herself not one, but a whole choir of voices, and she has a compass of at least an octave and a half. Every one of her fourteen spiracles, and each of her wings, is capable of producing sound; and these sounds can be endlessly varied in quality, intensity, and pitch. It is no exaggeration to say that the honey-bee is as accomplished a musician as any bird; but as each individual voice is for the most part lost in the general symphony of the hive, it is difficult to get a complete idea of her capabilities as a soloist.
The voice-apparatus in the spiracles is one of the most intricate things in the whole anatomy ofthe bee. It has a multiplicity of parts, and is obviously designed to convey a great variety of sounds. The wings also produce tones that run up or down in the scale, according to their rate of oscillation; and from them comes the sibilant note usually called buzzing. Listening to the hive-music at any season of the year, it is impossible to resist the thought that bees not only hold individual communication by means of these infinitely varied sounds, but that the general note given out by the multitude unerringly expresses the state of affairs within the hive for the time being. A prosperous stock voices its busy contentment in a way impossible to misunderstand. It is a deep, blithe, resonant sound, like the steady running of well-oiled machinery, each wheel adding its own whirring melody to the general theme. Weak or famishing colonies give out a wavering, intermittent note, the very voice of complaint and fear for the future. When a hive has lost its queen, a capable bee-master should have no difficulty in divining the trouble by listening at the hive-entrance. A queenless stock is all clamour and the hubbub of divided counsels. The ordinary rich reverberation of labour stops, and a sound of panic goes to and fro in the hive unceasingly. If a hive be quietly opened, and its queen removed with little disturbance, it may be some time before the bees discover their loss. Some colonies experimented with in this way realise their deprivationimmediately, and the hue-and-cry begins at once. But one of the most curious facts in bee-life is the variation in intelligence, and alertness of perception, between the different hives. A steady-going, dull race may be a considerable time before it perceives the absence of its queen. The common note of work goes on unchanged until the fact dawns on it. And then the peculiar shrill outcry commences, overpowering all other sounds until reason again asserts itself in the colony, and the bees set about the work of raising another queen.
The voice of the drone is deeper and hoarser than that of the worker-bee, by reason of his larger body; and his noisier buzzing is explained by his greater length and breadth of wing. The queen also has a deeper, more husky voice during flight; but she has, in addition, a peculiar cry of her own, an old familiar sound to bee-keepers all the world over. It is heard principally just before the swarming of the hive. Certain old skeppists profess to be able to foretell the date on which a swarm will issue by studying the cry of the queen. On quiet nights, just before the swarming-season commences, it may frequently be heard above the general murmur of the hive by bending the ear down to the entrance. It is a shrill piping sound, repeated over and over again, and often answered by other and fainter notes. How it is produced is not certainly known, but probably it is causedby the wings or legs being sharply rubbed together, much as a cricket or grasshopper utters its cry. The louder note is made by the old queen, and there is no doubt of its import. Jealousy and the lust of battle are on her, and she is trying to get at the young princesses in their cells. The cry is one of baffled fury as she strives with the guards about the cells, and the answering notes come from the imprisoned queens who are just as eager for the fray. The old skeppists are never far out in their reckoning. When this state of affairs has begun, the crisis is imminent; and the morrow is sure to see the emigrating party setting off for its new home, carrying the old queen irresistibly with it.
It has been said that the nurse-bees, who have the entire charge and care of the young brood, feed the larvæ from their mouths with a thick white fluid, which is aptly called bee-milk. All the time the nurses are engaged on this work, they are themselves hearty eaters of both honey and pollen; so that at first sight it appears as if the bee had the power of instantaneous digestion, feeding herself at one moment, and, at the next, regurgitating this food, changed into a totally different substance, to feed the young grubs. Moreover, there is another wonderful thing regarding this bee-milk. It has been proved by careful analysis that its composition varies considerably. The male, female, and queen-larvæ are all fed with it, but its constitution differs, not only with each kind of larva, but according to the age the larva has reached. The bee must therefore have her whole system of digestion under full voluntary control. How she manages this critical part of her work can only be understood by the aid of a good microscope.
The bee nursery; tending the young brood
Perhaps there is nothing more wonderful, in the whole wonderful anatomy of the bee, than her digestive organism and its contributory system of glands, each of which has its special and important use. When she draws up the nectar from the flowers, it passes at once into the first of her two stomachs, which is simply and solely a reservoir. Here it can remain indefinitely at the will of the bee; or it can be thrown up and poured into the comb-cells, to be brewed into honey; or it can be allowed to pass through a valve at the base of the reservoir into the bee’s second and lower stomach, where digestion takes place and the honey and pollen are formed into chyle. But, by one of the most ingenious devices in nature, this second stomach is also capable of returning its contents to the mouth, and the chyle is there changed into bee-milk for the nourishment of the larvæ.
The worker-bee has, in all, four distinct glands, each secreting a fluid with properties different from the other three. These glands are all situated in the mouth. Two of them have a common opening in the upper side of the root of the tongue; and as the bee sucks, their combined secretions minglewith the flower juices automatically, and the first step in the change of the nectar into honey takes place. The third gland is in the roof of the mouth, and it is the secretion from this gland which acts on the regurgitated chyle, and changes it into brood-food. The fourth gland is double. These twin-glands have their openings at the base of the jaws, and the action of chewing is necessary to excite their secretion.
The valve between the upper, or honey-stomach, and the lower, or chyle-stomach, has an extensible neck, and the bee can, at will, raise this telescopic piece through the interior of the honey-sac until the valve is pressed against the opening into the gullet. Thus the contents of the lower stomach can be driven into the mouth without coming into contact with the stored sweets in the reservoir, and this pre-digested matter is always ready at an instant’s notice for the use of the larva, or for the nourishment of drones or queen.
It has been said that the nursery-work of the hive is undertaken exclusively by the young bees during the first fortnight or so of their lives. After this time they make their first foraging expedition, beginning with pollen-gathering, and relinquishing this in turn for the collection of nectar when they have arrived at full maturity. The mature workers take no part in the feeding of the larvæ, except on very rare emergencies. In relation to this, it is a curious fact that the gland in the roof of the mouth,which acts on the chyle, forming it into brood-food, is in full development only during the first weeks of the worker-bee’s career. After that its activity swiftly declines, until, in old workers, it becomes largely atrophied.
The digestive gland-system of the honey-bee, although it has been fairly well explored by the scientific naturalists, is still much of a mystery, and this especially with regard to the glands attached to the jaws. The secretion from these glands—obviously a very powerful acid—is mainly used to convert the raw wax from its hard, brittle character into the soft, ductile material of which the combs are made. It is probably used to some extent, also, in the preparation of the brood-food, in conjunction with the gland in the roof of the mouth. It mingles with the pollen when this is masticated, and no doubt it has various other uses; but no one seems as yet to have discovered why these two glands should be so enormously developed in the queen, who takes no part in the nursery-work or comb-building. The whole question will naturally have little more than a passing interest for the general reader; but, to the bee-keeper with a microscope, it takes a prominent place among the debatable things in hive-life. If the difference between the queen-bee and the worker-bee—a difference of organic structure as well as mere development—is really brought about by variation in the quality andquantity of the food supplied to the larva, then the action of these glands cannot be over-estimated in importance, and cannot be studied too deeply: they form the very spring and fount of life. Yet is it certain that the influence brought to bear on the young grubs by the nurse-bees is wholly restricted to the matter of food? The worker-bee has several curious organs and gland-systems in various parts of her body, in addition to those already enumerated, to which no rational use has yet been assigned. The more we study her extraordinary equipment, the less justification there appears to be for dogmatising about her, limiting or particularising the function of any one gland or implement in the whole unending array. The old adage, that there is nothing invariable about the honey-bee, is like to be as true with regard to her physiology as it is with her habits of life; and, for all we can tell, to-morrow’s knowledge may render obsolete much of the carefully garnered knowledge of to-day.
If the story of the honey-bee’s anatomy has everywhere some of the elements of romance about it—in its unexpected incidents, its adventurous colour, its shadow of a great design—this spirit suffers no abatement when we come, in a last view of it, to consider her as one carrying arms, one bearing such a weapon of offence as never came into human mind to fashion. The long curved scimitar of the queen, which she cherishes socarefully that nothing will induce her to strike with it except when it is to be turned against a royal foe, is otherwise little else than a harmless piece of domestic furniture. But the sting of the valorous worker-bee, seen under a microscope, is a positively terrifying engine of destruction. Popular science generally describes it as a sheath containing a barbed and poisonous dart; and the trite comparison is always made of the bee’s sting with the finest sewing-needle, the latter being likened to a rough bar of iron. The idea of a sheath is pure fiction, as a little painstaking examination will soon reveal.
The bee’s sting is made up of three separate lances, each with a barbed edge, and each capable of being thrust forward independently of the others. The central and broader lance has a hollow face, furnished at each side with a rail, or beading, which runs its whole length. On the back of each of the other two lances there is a longitudinal groove, and into these grooves fit the raised beadings of the central lancet. Thus the sting is like a sword with three blades—united, but sliding upon one another—the barbed points of which continue to advance alternately into the wound, going ever deeper and deeper of their own malice aforethought after the initial thrust is made. It is a device of war, compared to which the explosive bullet is but a clumsy brutality. Yet this is not all. To make its death-dealing powersdoubly sure, this thorough-minded amazon must fill the haft of her triple blade with a subtle poison, and so contrive its sliding mechanism that the same impulse, which drives the points successively forward, drenches the whole weapon with a fatal juice.
The tendency to be unduly scientific, to meet these things with exact and unimaginative interest, receives its final quietus here. For he who realises the whole deadly efficacy of the honey-bee’s sting cannot logically pass it by as a mere remarkable provision of nature, praising God for it complacently, but must concede it a much wider significance. This complicated weapon of the stunted, sex-perverted worker-bee owes its existence as much to deliberate art as to nature, or those who watch the Omnipotent in hive-life are strangely and perversely led astray. In the queen-mother, whose physical organism may be said to be comparatively unchanged from its aboriginal type, we see the part corresponding to the worker’s sting, essentially another creation. The queen’s ovipositor is longer; it is curved; the barbs upon it are small and insignificant; the fluid in the secreting-gland is no poison at all, but a thick opaque substance, whose true use is probably to glue the eggs safely to the bottoms of the cells. She is also provided with a pair of blunt instruments covered with sensitive hairs, which serve, with the ovipositor, to guide the egg securely toits destination. The worker-bee has these feelers on either side of her sting, but she has perverted them to a very different office, that of seeking out the vulnerable parts of her enemy. And what a drastic change her will, or that of her foster-mothers, has wrought in the whole contrivance! She has bartered the privilege of motherhood and years of life for a few short months and a share in the communal sovereignty. She must be ready to further the well-being of the hive by the art of war as well as by the arts of peace. Therefore she has deliberately helped in fashioning the ploughshares into cannon. A little change in her food as a nursling, an infinitesimal leaking from a gland that takes the full power of the strongest glass to see,—and, with all the other multitudinous changes of form and character, this last miracle comes quietly into being. The egg-depositing shaft grows short and straight; its moderate indentations become cruel jagged barbs designed to hold as well as to kill; the harmless, egg-fastening gluten is quickened into a virulent poison; and the death-dealing thing is ready and ripe for service against all honey-lovers, the hereditary foes of the hive.