LOVE AMONG SOCIAL ANIMALS
_Organization of reproduction among
hymenoptera.--Bees.--Wedding of the
queen.--Mother bee, cause and consciousness
of the hive.--Sexual royalty.--Limits of
intelligence among bees.--Natural logic and human
logic.--Wasps.--Bumble-bees.--Ants.--Notes on their
habits.--Very advanced state of their civilization.--
Slavery and parasitism among ants.--Termites.--The
nine principal active forms of termites.--Great
age of their civilization.--Beavers.--Tendency of
industrious animals to inactivity._
Social hymenoptera, bumble-bees, hornets, wasps, bees, have peculiar
love customs very different from those of other animal species. It is
not monogamy, since one finds in it nothing resembling the couple,
nor polygamy, since the males know only one female, when they have
even that adventure, and since the females are fecundated for the
whole of their life by a single fecundation. It is, rather, a sort of
matriarchate, even though the queen bee is not generally the mother of
more than a part of the hive whereover she rules, the other part having
sprung from the queen who has gone off with the new swarm, or from the
one who has remained in the former hive. In very numerous hives there
are about six or seven hundred males to one female. Copulation takes
place in the air; as is the case with ants, it is only possible after
a long flight has filled with air the pouches which cause the male's
organ to emerge. Between these pockets, or aëriferous bladders shaped
like perforated horns, emerges the penis, a small white body, plump
and bent back at the point. In the vagina, which is round, wide and
shallow, the sperm-pouch opens; it is a reservoir which can contain
they say, a score of million of spermatozoides, destined to fecundate
the eggs, during several years in proportion as they are to be laid.
The form of the penis and the manner in which the sperm is coagulated
by a viscous liquid into a veritable spermatophore, cause the death
of the male. The copulation ended, he wishes to disengage himself but
only manages to do so in leaving in the vagina not only the penis but
all the organs attached to it. He falls like an empty bag, while the
queen, returned to the hive, stops at the entrance, makes her toilet,
aided by the workers who crowd about her: with her mandibles she gently
removes the spine which has remained in her belly, and cleans the place
with lustral attention. Then she enters the second period of her life:
maternity. This penis which remains fast in the vagina makes one think
of the darts of fighters which also remain in the wound; be it love or
war the over-courageous beastlet expires, worn out and mutilated; there
is in this a peculiar facility of dehiscence which seems very rare.
The wedding of the queen bee remained a long time absolutely
mysterious, and even today there are only a very few observers who
have been the distant witnesses of it. Réaumur, having isolated a
queen and a male, witnessed a play or combat with movements which he
interpreted with ingenuity. He could not see the actual coupling, which
only takes place in the air. His story, is unique and nothing since
has confirmed it. He shows us a queen approaching a male, sucking him
with her proboscis, offering him honey, stroking him with her feet, and
finally irritated by the coldness of her suitor, mounting his back,
applying her vulva to the male organ, which Réaumur describes very well
("Memoirs," tome V) and which he represents as covered with a white
viscous liquid. The real preludes, at least in a state of liberty,
contradict the great observer. The female seems in no way aggressive.
Here are the three authentic accounts I have been able to discover:
"6th July, 1849, M. Hannemann, bee-keeper at Wurtemburg, Thuringia was
seated near my hive when his attention was aroused by an unaccustomed
buzzing. Suddenly he saw thirty or forty drones" (i.e., false drones,
male bees) "rapidly pursuing a queen-bee, about twenty or thirty feet
up in the air. The group filled a space about two feet in diameter.
Sometimes, in their flight, they came as low as ten feet from the
ground, then rose, flying north to south. He followed them about a
hundred yards, then a building interrupted him. The group of drones
formed a sort of cone with the queen at the summit, then the cone
enlarged into a globe of which she was the centre: at this moment the
queen succeeded in getting away and rose vertically, still followed by
the drones who had reformed the cone under her."[1]
"Some years later the Rev. Millette, at Witemarsh, observed the final
phase of the act. During a hiving, he noticed a flying queen, who
an instant later, was stopped by a male. After having flown about a
rod they fell to the ground hooked to each other. He approached and
captured them both, at the very moment when the male had abandoned
himself to the embrace; he carried them to the house and let them
loose in a closed room. The queen, angry, flew toward the window; the
male after dragging himself for an instant across the open palm of the
observer's hand, fell to floor and died. Both male and female had at
the tip of the abdomen drops of a milky white liquid; by squeezing the
male, he saw that the male had lost his genital organs." (Farmer and
Gardener, 1859.)
"Having seen the queen go out, M. Carrey closed the entrance of the
hive. During his absence, which lasted a quarter of an hour, three
false-drones came to the entrance and finding it closed, continued
flying. When the queen on her return was only about three feet from
the hive, one of the drones flew very rapidly toward her, throwing his
legs around her body. They stopped, resting on a long grass-blade. Then
an explosion was distinctly heard, and they separated. The drone fell
to the ground quite dead, with abdomen much contracted. After a few
circles in the air, the mother entered the hive." (Copulation of the
mother bee, in l'Apiculteur, 6e année, 1862.)
Save the remark about the final explosion, these three accounts accord
well enough, and give an exact idea of one of the couplings most
difficult to get sight of.
It is, moreover, the one half-obscure point in bee life. One knows
all the rest, their three sexes, rigorously specialized, the precise
industry of the wax-workers, the diligence of the collectresses, the
political sense of these extraordinary amazons, their initiatives, when
the hive is too full, their starts for the formation of new swarms,
the duels of queens where the populace intervene, the massacre of
males as soon as they are useless, the nurse's art in transforming a
vulgar larva into the larva of a queen, the methodical activity of
these republics where all wills, united in a single conscience, have
no other aim but the common well-being and the conservation of the
race. It is however these over-mechanical virtues which constitute
the inferiority of the bee; the workers are extremely laborious
and well-behaved, but they lack even that slight personality which
characterizes sexed insects. The much less reasonable queen is more
living, she is capable of jealousy, rage, of despair when she feels
her royalty menaced by the new queen whom the nurses have bred up in
secret. Even the useless, noisy, pillaging, parasitic males, drunk and
swollen with vain sperm are more attractive than the honest workers,
and handsomer also, stronger, more slender, more elegant. Bee-lovers
generally despise these musketeers, yet it is they who incarnate the
animality, that is to say the beauty of the specie. If it is true as
M. Maeterlinck believes (La Vie des Abeilles), that the most vigorous
of seven or eight hundred males finally seduces the royal virgin, then
their laziness, their greediness, their giddy staggering are but so
many virtues.
It seems that the queen and even the workers can without fecundation
lay eggs which will hatch into males; but copulation is necessary in
order to produce females and queens; now as only the queen can receive
the male, a hive without a queen is doomed. That is the practical
point of view, the sexual point of view leads to other reflections. A
female can, quite alone, give birth to a male: but to have an egg hatch
female, it must be fecundated by a male born spontaneously: one observes
here the real exteriorization of the male organ, a segmentation of the
genital power, into two forces, the male force and the female. Thus
disunited, it acquires a new faculty which will fully unfold itself
by the reintegration of the two halves of the initial force into a
single force. But why do the virgin-born ovules necessarily give birth
to males, among bees, and to females among plant lice? That is the
question defying answer. All that one sees is that parthenogenesis is
always transitory, and that after a number of virginal generations,
normal fecundation always intervenes.
One can not say that the mother bee is a true queen, a veritable
chief, but she is the important personage in the hive, the one without
whom life stops. The workers have the air of being mistresses; in
reality their nervous centre is in the queen; they act only for her,
and by her. Her disappearance sets the hive crazy, and drives it to
absurd endeavours, such as the transformation of a nurse into a layer,
though she will give eggs of one sex only, so many useless mouths. In
reflecting on this last expedient one can measure the importance of
sex, and understand the absolutism of its royalty. Sex is king, and
there is no royalty save the sexual. The making neuter of the workers,
which sets them out of norm, if it is a cause of order in the hive, is
above all a cause of death. There are no living creatures save those
who can perpetuate life.
The interest offered by bees is very great, but does not pass that
offered by the observation of most hymenoptera, social or solitary, or
of certain neuroptera, such as termites; or even by beavers, and many
birds. But bees have been through many ages our sugar-producers, and
they alone; hence man's tenderness for insects more valuable than all
others to him. Their intelligence is well developed, but soon shows its
limitations. People pretend that bees know their master, a manifest
error. The relations of bees and man are purely human. It is evident
that they are as ignorant of man as are all the other insects, and all
other invertebrata. They allow themselves to be exploited, in the sense
of their instinct, to the limit of famine and muscular exhaustion.
Virgil's phrase is excessively true, in all the senses one wishes to
take: _Sic vos non vobis mellificatis apes_. (Bees making honey not
for yourselves.) These clever, witty creatures are fooled by the gross
fakes of our industrial cunning. When they have stacked their winter's
provisions, honey, into their wax combs, one removes the honeycombs,
and replaces them by sockets of varnished paper: and the solemn bees,
set themselves to forgetting their long labours; before these virgin
combs, they have but one idea: to fill them. They restart work with a
bustle which would excite veritable pity in any man but a bee-keeper.
These commercials have invented a hive with moveable combs. The bees
will never know. Bees are stupid.
But we who see the limits of intelligence in bees, should consider
the limits of our own. There are limits; it is possible to conceive
brains who observing us, would say: men are stupid. All intelligence
is limited; it is just this shock against the limit, against the wall,
which by the pain it causes, engenders consciousness. We are not to
laugh too much at the bees who gaily furnish the mobile combs of their
improved hives. We are perhaps the slaves of a master who exploits us,
and who will remain forever unknown. The polygamy, or if one wish, the
polyandry of bees, pretext for this digression, is then purely virtual;
it is in the state of possibility, but it will never be realized, since
the fecundity of the queen is assured by a single act. The excessive
multiplicity of males corresponds doubtless to an ancient order in
which the females were more numerous. In any case only two or three
males out of about a thousand, are used, or let us say ten, if you wish
to suppose very frequent swarming, this demonstrates that one must not
prejudge the habits of an animal specie by the overabundance of one
sex or another, and that, in a general fashion, one must place natural
logic above our human logic, derived from mathematical logic. Facts in
nature are connected by a thousand knots of which no one is solvable by
human logic. When one of these tangles is unravelled before our eyes
we marvel at the simplicity of its mechanism, we think we understand,
we make generalities, we prepare to open neighbouring mysteries with
the same key: illusion. One always has to begin again at the start.
Thus the sciences of observation become increasingly obscure as one
penetrates further into the labyrinth.
Among wasps and hornets there is nothing resembling polygamy, even
potentially. A fecundated female after passing the winter, constructs,
by herself, the first foundations of a nest, lays the eggs, from which
sexless individuals are born; these workers then assume all material
labours, finish the nest, watch the larvæ which the female continues to
produce. These are now males and females: after coupling the males die,
then the workers, the females become languid, those who survive will
found as many new tribes.
The generation of bumble-bees is more curious, the differentiation of
castes more complicated. There are among them, males, workers, small
females, great females. A great female, having passed the winter,
founds a nest in the earth, often in moss (there is a sort called the
moss bee), she constructs a wax comb, lays. From the first eggs come
workers who, as in wasps, construct the definitive nest, pillage, make
honey, and being more industrious than the other sort of bees who fear
dampness, they scour the country long after sunset. After the workers,
the little females see light; they have no function save laying,
without fecundation, the eggs which will hatch male. Simultaneously the
queen produces great females who will soon couple with the males. Then,
as with wasps, all the colony dies except the fecundated great females,
by whom the cycle will recommence, the following spring.
There are three casts of ants, or four if one count, the division
of neuters into workers and fighters, as among termites. Here, as
with bees, the neuters are the base of the republic, the males die
after mating, the females after laying. "There are," says M. Janet
(_Recherches sur l'anatomie de la fourmi_) "workers so different from
the others, in the development of their mandibles and the largeness
of their heads that one calls them soldiers, a name according with
the rôle they fill in the colony." These soldiers are also butchers,
who cut up prey which is too large or dangerous. Specialization is
the only superiority of the neuters who for the rest seem inferior to
the females and to the males in size, muscling and visual organs. The
females are sometimes half as large again as the neuters, the males
being between the two sizes. The ant shows much more intelligence than
the bee. Before this tiny people one seems really to touch humanity.
Consider that the ants have slaves, and domestic animals. First the
plant lice, preferably those who live on roots, and, at need, those of
the rose-bush, who are milked, and who permit it, subjected by long
heredity. _Aphis formicarum vacca_, says Linnæus briefly (beetle the
ants' cow). But wandering herds are not enough for them, they keep
in the interior of their ant-hills, colonies of slave plant-lice, of
domesticated staphylins. The staphylins are small coleoptera with
mobile abdomen, one of their species is only found among ants. They are
domesticated to the point of no longer being able to feed themselves:
the ants stuff the necessary food into their mouths. In return the
staphylins furnish their masters a revenue analogous to that which they
get from the plant-lice: from the bunch of hairs rising at the base of
their abdomen they seem to exude a delectable liquor, at least one sees
the ants suck these hairs with great eagerness. These animals permit
it. They are so much at home, that the same observer (Muller, traduit
par Brullé, _dans le Dictionnaire d'histoire naturelle de Guérin, au
mot Pselaphiens_) has seen them coupling without fear in the midst
of the busy ant people, the male hunched on the back of the female,
solidly crammed against the mellifluous tuft of ant's delicacies.
One knows that the red ants make war on the black ants and steal their
nymphs, who, retained in captivity, make them excellent domestics,
attentive and obedient. White humanity also, at one point in its
history, found itself faced with a like opportunity, but less prudent
than the red ant, it let it pass, from sentimentalism, thus betraying
its destiny, renouncing, under Christian inspiration, the complete and
logical development of its civilization. Is it not amusing that slavery
is presented to us as anti-natural, when it is on the contrary, normal
and excessively natural to the most intelligent of animals? And in an
order of ideas more closely related to the subject of this book, if
the making neuter of a part of the population, placing them in castes
vowed to continence, is an anti-natural attempt, how is it that social
hymenoptera, ants, bees, bumble-bees, and termites among neuroptera,
have managed it so well, and have made it the basis of their social
state? Doubtless there is nothing like it among animals; but mammals,
apart from man, that monster, even including beavers, are infinitely
inferior to insects. If the habits of social birds (for there are such)
were better known, one might find analogous practices among them. The
sexual co-operation of all the members of a people being useless so
far as the conservation of the race is concerned; and on the other
hand inferior species living as neighbours to a superior species being
destined to disappear, slavery is good for the inferiors as it assures
them perpetuity and a sort of evolution suited to their feebleness.
A little brown ant, the anergates, having no workers establishes itself
as parasite in an ant-hill and gets itself served by workers of another
species in order to live. What ingenuity of the sexed, what docility
of the sexless! The worker ants are clearly degenerate females, among
whom sexual sensibility has been completely transformed into maternal
sensibility. One observes, moreover, in many species an intermediate
type of woman-worker, who gives the key to this evolution. One should
note that after fecundation the females do not all re-enter the city;
where they fall, they build, as mother-bumble-bees, a provisory nest,
acting then like workers, and await the first egg-laying, which will
produce exclusively real workers and will thereby permit the normal
construction of the new ant-hill.
There are among ants, as among butterflies, hermaphrodites along the
medial line, or sometimes along an oblique line: this gives absurd
creatures, half one thing, half the other, or singularities such as a
female with a worker's had who functions as a worker.[2]
Polygamy by massacre of males, as among herbivora, and gallinaceæ seems
a step toward a more logical and more economic distribution of the
sexes. If antelopes perpetuate themselves very well with one male to
an hundred females, is it not an indication that a part at least of
the sacrificed males might have dispensed with being born? And would
it not be better, in the interest of the antelopes, that a part of
these males, if they ought to continue to be bora, should be normally
sexless, as with termites, and entrusted with some social duty?
The organization of termites is very pretty; it will do to finish off
this brief review of animal societies founded on the unsexing of sexes.
One has already noted, in the chapters on dimorphism, the diversity
of sexual forms, corresponding to four quite distinct castes. The
minute examination of one of their republics permits one to assert
differentiations much more numerous, for each of the principal castes
passes through active larval and nymphal forms, adolescent forms, such
as most neuroptera and libellules also present. In taking count of
all the nuances one may observe in a state (to use the familiar word)
of termites fifteen different forms, all with marked characteristics.
The principal are: 1. Workers, 2. Soldiers, 3. Small males, 4. Small
females, 5. Large males, 6. Large females, 7. Nymphs with little cases,
8. Nymphs with long cases, 9. Larvæ. When one attacks an ant hill, the
soldiers arrive at the breach, very threatening, odd, with their bodies
all head, all mandibles. The enemy routed, the workers come to repair
the damage. There are sometimes several female egg-layers; sometimes
there is only one male: copulation always takes place outside the hill,
and as with ants, the males perish, while the fecundated females become
the origin of a new state. The expeditions of travelling termites,
common as fighting termites in South Africa, are naturally directed
by soldiers. Sparmann (cited in Guérin's Dictionnaire d'histoire
naturelle) observed them during his voyage to the Cape, and says
they behave rather as non-coms in close rank, or climbing onto grass
blades, watch the defile, beating with their feet, if the order were
bad, or too slow. The signal is at once understood, and obeyed by the
rank at once, is answered by a whistle. There is in this something so
marvellous that one hesitates to accept the traveller's interpretation
in entirety. It is not the spontaneous and mechanical discipline of
the ants, but the consenting obedience, so difficult to obtain from
inferior humanities. After all, nothing is impossible, and without
being credulous in these matters, one need be astonished at nothing.
Nevroptera are, moreover, exceeding old on the earth; they date from
before the coal-beds: their civilization is some thousands of centuries
older than human civilizations.
Beavers are the only mammals, man excepted, whose industry indicates
an intelligence near that of insects. But their societies offer no
complication, they are a simple grouping of couples. They do not
construct their dams until the females have been delivered, this
happens toward the end of July, one sees no other connection between
their sexual habits and their remarkable works.
These enormous trees felled and made to lie where intended, these
piles stuck in the river-bed and interbound with twisted branches,
these impermeable dams, all this hard and complicated work, the beaver
accepts when pushed by necessity. He needs an artificial lake with
unvarying depth; if he finds one made by nature, he accepts it, and
limits himself to erecting his regular huts. Thus osmies, chalicodomes,
or xylocopes,--or men, if they find by chance a nest prepared, hasten
to profit by it. The instinct of construction is by no means blind; it
is a faculty which will not be employed very often save in extremity:
the present inhabitant of the Loire valley still arranges the caves
for domestic use. To its injury, but of that it knows nothing, the bee
profits by the artificial combs slid into its hive. The Rhone beaver
has rested ever since men erected such excellent dams there. The fairy
palace which rises in mid forest for the rubbing of a ring is the
human, and animal, ideal.
I must dose these observations on natural societies, in pointing
out that if they are today based on something quite different from
polygamy, it seems likely that they were in origin societies either of
polygamy or of sexual communism. If one starts from communism one will
very soon evolve either toward the couple, or toward polygamy, if it is
a matter of mammals; or toward sexual neutralization if it is a matter
of insects. The couple, polygamy, neutralization are methods; sexual
communism is not a method, and for that reason one must consider it as
the chaos from which order has little by little emerged.
[1] Bienenzeitung (Gazette des Abeilles) janvier, 1850.
[2] E. Rambert, after A. Forel, les Mœurs des fourmis (Bibliothèque
universelle, tome LV).