Maeterlinck, in his "Life of the Bee" resists the
conclusion of Sir John Lubbock that flies are more
intelligent than honey bees:
If you place in a bottle half a dozen bees [says Sir
John], and the same number of flies, and lay the bottle
down horizontally with its base to the window, you will
find that the bees will persist till they die of
exhaustion or hunger in their endeavors to discover an
issue through the glass; while the flies, in less than two
minutes, will all have sallied forth through the neck on
the opposite side.
The flies are more intelligent than the bees because their problems of
life are much more complicated; they are fraught with many more dangers;
their enemies lurk on all sides; while the bees have very few natural
enemies. There are no bee-catchers in the sense that there are scores of
flycatchers. I know of no bird that preys upon the worker bees. The
kingbird is sometimes called the "bee martin" because he occasionally
snaps up the drones. All our insectivorous birds prey upon the flies;
the swallows sweep them up in the air, the swifts scoop them in, while,
besides the so-called flycatchers, the cedar-birds, the thrushes, the
vireos, and all other soft-billed birds, subsist more or less upon them.
Try to catch a big blow-fly upon the window-pane and see how difficult
the trick is, while with a honey bee it is no trick at all. Or try to
"swat" the ordinary house-fly with your hand. See how he squares himself
and plants himself as your threatening hand approaches! He is ready for
a trial of speed. He seems to know that your hand is slower than he is,
and he is right in most cases. Now try a honey bee. The case is
reversed. The bee has never been stalked; it shows no fear; and to crush
it is as easy as to crush a beetle.
The wit and cunning of all animals are developed by their struggle for
existence. The harder the struggle, the more their intelligence. Our
skunk and porcupine are very stupid because they do not have to take
thought about their own safety; Nature has done that for them.
To bolster up his case, Maeterlinck urges that "the capacity for folly
so great in itself argues intelligence," which amounts to saying that
the more fool you are, the more you know.
Buffon did not share Maeterlinck's high opinion of the intelligence of
the bee; he thought the dog, the monkey, and the majority of other
animals possess far more; an opinion which I share. Indeed, of free
intelligence the bee possesses very little. The slave of an
overmastering instinct, as our new nature poet, McCarthy, says,
She makes of labor an eternal lust.
Bees do wonderful things, but do them blindly. They work as well (or
better) in the darkness as in the light. The Spirit of the Hive knows
and directs all. The unit is the swarm, and not the individual bee.
The bee does not know fear; she does not know love. She will defend the
swarm with her life, but her fellows she heeds not.
It is very doubtful if the individual bees of the same hive recognize
one another at all outside the hive. Every beehunter knows how the bees
from the same tree will clip and strike at one another around his box,
when they are first attracted to it. After they are seriously engaged in
carrying away his honey, they pay no attention to one another or to bees
from other swarms. That bees tell one another of the store of honey they
have found is absurd. The unity of the swarm attends to that.
Maeterlinck tells of a little Italian bee that he once experimented upon
during an afternoon, the results showing that this bee had told the news
of her find to eighteen bees! Its "vocabulary" stood it in good stead!
Maeterlinck's conception of the Spirit of the Hive was an inspiration,
and furnishes us with the key to all that happens in the hive. The
secret of all its economies are in the phrase. Having hit upon this
solution, he should have had the courage to stand by it. But he did not.
He is continually forgetting it and applying to his problem the
explanations we apply in our dealings with one another. He talks of the
power of the bees to give "expression to their thoughts and feelings";
of their "vocabulary," phonetic and tactile; he says that the
"extraordinary also has a name and place in their language"; that they
are able to "communicate to each other news of an event occurring
outside the hive"; all of which renders his Spirit of the Hive
superfluous. He quotes from a French apiarist who says that the explorer
of the dawn,--the early bee,--like the early bird that catches the worm,
returns to the hive with the news that "the lime-trees are blooming
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 and the lilies are overflowing with pollen." Whereupon the
bees must organize quickly and arrange to divide the work. They probably
call a council of the wise ones and after due discussion and formalities
proceed to send out their working expeditions. "Five thousand of the
sturdiest will sally forth to the lime-trees, while three thousand
juniors go and refresh the white clover." "They make daily calculations
as to the means of obtaining the greatest possible wealth of saccharine
liquid."
When Maeterlinck speaks of "the hidden genius of the hive issuing its
commands," or recognizes the existence among the bees of spiritual
communications that go beyond a mere "yes" or "no," he is true to his own
conception.
The division of labor among hive bees is of course spontaneous, like all
their other economies--not a matter of thought, but of instinct.
Maeterlinck and other students of the honey bee make the mistake of
humanizing the bee, thus making them communicate with one another as we
communicate. Bees have a language, they say; they tell one another this
and that; if one finds honey or good pasturage, she tells her sisters,
and so on. This is all wide of the mark. There is nothing analogous to
verbal communication among the insects. The unity of the swarm, or the
Spirit of the Hive, does it all. Bees communicate and coöperate with one
another as the cells of the body communicate and coöperate in building
up the various organs. The spirit of the body coördinates all the
different organs and tissues, making a unit of the body.
If some outside creature, such as a mouse or a snail, penetrates into
the hive, and dies there, the bees encase it in wax, or bury it where it
lies, so that it cannot contaminate the hive, and a foreign object in
the body, such as a bullet in the lungs, or in the muscles, becomes
encysted in an analogous manner, and is thus rendered harmless.
Kill a bee in or near the hive and the smell of its crushed body will
infuriate the other bees. But crush a bee in the fields or by the
bee-hunter's box which is swarming with bees, and the units from the
same hive heed it not.
Bees have no fear. They have no love or attachment for one another as
animals have. If one of their number is wounded or disabled, they
ruthlessly expel it from the hive. In fact, they belong to another world
of beings that is absolutely oblivious of the world of which we form a
part. They murder or expel the drones, after they have done their work
of fertilizing the queen, in the most cruel and summary manner. Their
apparent attachment to the queen, and their loyalty to her, are not
personal. They do not love her. It is the Spirit of the Hive, or the
cult of the swarm solicitous about itself. There are no brothers,
sisters, fathers, mothers, among the bees; there are only co-workers,
working not for the present, but for the future. When we enter the
kingdom of the bee, we must leave all our human standards behind. These
little people have no red blood, no organs of sense, as we have; they
breathe and hear through their legs, their antennæ.
The drones do not know the queen as such in the hive. Their instincts
lead them to search for her in the air during her nuptial flight, and
they know her only there. The drones have thirteen thousand eyes, while
the workers have only six thousand. This double measure of the power of
vision is evidently to make sure that the males discover the queen in
her course through the air.
The guards that take their stand at the gate, the bees that become fans
at the entrance to ventilate the hive, the nurses, the bees that bring
the bee-bread, the bees that pack it into the cells, the bees that go
forth to find a home for the new swarm, the sweepers and cleaners of the
hive, the workers that bring propolis to seal up the cracks and
crevices--all act in obedience to the voiceless Spirit of the Hive.
After we have discounted Maeterlinck so far as the facts will bear us
out in doing, it remains to be said that he is the philosopher of the
insect world. If Fabre is the Homer, as he himself has said, Maeterlinck
is the Plato of that realm. How wisely he speaks of the insect world in
his latest volume, "Mountain Paths":
The insect does not belong to our world. The other
animals, the plants even, notwithstanding their dumb life
and the great secrets which they cherish, do not seem
wholly foreign to us. In spite of all, we feel a certain
earthly brotherhood with them. They often surprise and
amaze our intelligence, but do not utterly upset it. There
is something, on the other hand, about the insect that
does not belong to the habits, the ethics, the psychology
of our globe. One would be inclined to say that the insect
comes from another planet, more monstrous, more energetic,
more insane, more atrocious, more infernal than our own.
One would think that it was born of some comet that had
lost its course and died demented in space.
Speaking of the intelligence of bees reminds me of a well-known woodsman
and camp-fire man who recently extolled in print the intelligence of
hornets, saying that they have the ability to differentiate friends from
foes. "They know us and we talk to them and they are made to feel as
welcome as any of our guests." "When a stranger visits the camp, they
attract the attention of one they know _who recognizes their signal by
thought or gesture and leaves immediately, returning only when the
stranger has departed_." (The italics are mine.) He says the same
hornets apparently come to them year after year, greeting them on their
arrival, and, should they be accompanied by strangers, they treat them
with the same deference as "when they visit us after we have been in
camp some time."
Did one ever hear before of such well-bred and well-mannered bees? What
would Maeterlinck say to all that? Its absurdity becomes apparent when
we remember that hornets live but a single season, that none of them
lives over the winter, save the queen, and that she never leaves the
nest in summer after she has got her family of workers around her.