The luxury of all summer's sweet sensation is to be found when one lies
at length in the warm, fragrant grass, soaked with sunshine, aware of
regions of blossoming clover and of a high heaven filled with the hum of
innumerous bees.
It is that happy hum--which seems to the closed eyes as if the silent
sunbeams themselves had found a voice and were brimming the bending blue
with music as they went about their busy chemistry--that gives the chief
charm to the moment; for it tunes the mind to its own key, the murmuring
expression of all pleasant things, the chord of sunshine and perfume and
flowers.
And it is, indeed, the sound of a process scarcely less subtile than the
sunbeams' own, of that alchemy by which the limpid drop of sweet
insipidity at the root of any petal is transformed to the pungent flavor
and viscid drip of honey. A beautiful woman, weary of her frivolities,
once half in jest envied the fate of Io, dwelling all day in the sun,
all night in the starshine and dew, and fed on pasturage of violets; but
there is the morning beam, the evening ray, the breeze, the dew, the
spirit of the violet and of the cowslip, all gathered like a
distillation and sealed into the combs, and this is the tune to which it
is harvested. Beyond doubt there is no such eminent sound of gladness in
all the world. The cricket seems to speak of more spiritual things than
those of this sphere. As to bird-song, poets differ.
"O nightingale, what doth she ail,
And is she sad or jolly?
Sure ne'er on earth was sound of mirth
So like to melancholy,"
exclaims one in compromise with all the others. Every echo is full of a
lonesome sadness. The musical baying of a distant dog by night
accentuates the depth and darkness and stillness; the crowing of cocks
from farm to farm, in their cordon of sentinelship against the invasion
of the dawn, tells the hearer how all too well the world is getting on
without him; the lowing of kine through the clear noon air comes robbed
of roughness, in its deep, mellow sonority, like the oboe and bassoon,
full of a penetrating pathos. Let Nature but interpose a sheet of water
or a bit of wood, and the merriest joy-bells that ever rang are infused
with that melancholy which is the overplus of rapture. But there is no
distance to lend that enchantment to the buzzing of a bee: it is close
about us, a universal sibilation; the air is made of it; it sings of
work, that joy and privilege,--of a home, of plenty, of a world whose
color and odor make one giddy with good cheer; it may have many varying
elements, but its constant is content.
"When the south wind, in May days,
With a net of shining haze,
Silvers the horizon wall,
And, with softness touching all,
Tints the human countenance
With a color of romance,
And, infusing subtile heats,
Turns the sod to violets,
Thou, in sunny solitudes,
Rover of the underwoods,
The green silence dost displace
With thy mellow breezy bass."
And although this burly rover is not our little bee of the hive, but his
saucy, sonsy country-cousin, the song of the one is scarcely sweeter
than that of the other, while they blend into rarest unison. And well
may both be sweet, it is such a pleasant thing to live; there is the
hive to furnish, there is the dear nest underground; they forget
yesterday's rain, to-morrow's frost is but a dim phantasm,--the sun is
so warm to-day on their little brown backs, and here is such store of
honey. It is true, the humble-bee is much the most dazzling,--he has the
prestige of size, moreover; but the other may find some favor in his new
bronze and gold armor and his coarse velvet mantle,--there are few
creatures that can afford to labor in half such array as that, but when
the work is so nice one's dress must correspond: it would never do to
rumple round among the rose-leaves, black as a beetle, and expect not
only to be heaped with delicates, but to be intrusted with love-tokens.
One cannot be so splendid as the moths and sphinxes, who have nothing to
do all summer but to lay eggs among the petals that their offspring may
devour them; no, there is work to be done. But though one toils, one has
a dignity to maintain; one remembers it readily when he has been made
the insignia of royalty, when kings have worn his effigy, when popes
have put him in their coats-of-arms; one cannot forget that he has
himself been called the Winged Pontiff of the Flowers. See him now, as
he hovers over the clover, not the red kind,--for him each floret of
that is deep as those shafts of the hashish-eater's dream, where the
broken tubes of the honeysuckle being planted in the sand, their mouths
level with the floor of the desert, they became wells, and the Arab
women dropped their buckets therein and drew them up dripping with
honey,--it is the small white clover on which he alights, whose sweets
are within reach of his little proboscis; or, lost in that great
blue-bell, he swings it with his motion and his melody; or he burrows
deep in the heart of a rose, never rolling there, as it has erroneously
been said, but, collecting the pollen with his pincers, swims over the
flower while brushing it into the baskets of his hinder legs, and then
lights again for a fresh fare, till, laden and regaled, he loudly issues
forth, dusty with treasure; and _les rois faineans_, the Merovingian
kings, who powdered their heads and their beards with gold, were no
finer fellows than he. But a few months' wear and tear will suffice to
tarnish him; by-and-by the little body will be battered and rusty, the
wings will be ragged and worn; one day as he goes home heavily burdened,
if no sailing blue-winged swallow have skimmed him up long ago, the
flagging flight will fail, a breeze will be too much for him, a
rain-drop will dash him down, he will fall, and some garden-toad, the
focal length of whose vision is exactly the distance to which he can
dart his tongue, will see a tired bee blundering across his sky, and
will make a morsel of him, honey-bag, pollen, and all. Yet that is in
the future, far outside the focal length of any bee's vision, that
fortunate vision which finds creation so fair and himself the centre of
it, each rose made for him to rifle, and welcome everywhere. "The docile
flower inclines and lends itself to the unquiet movements of the insect.
The sanctuary that she had shut from the winds, from the sight, she
opens to her dear bee, who, all impregnated with her sweetness, goes
carrying off her messages. The delicious precautions that Nature has
taken to veil her mysteries from the profane do not for a single moment
arrest this venturesome explorer, who makes himself one of the
household, and is never afraid of being the third. This flower, for
instance, is protected by two petals which join each other in a dome
above; it is thus that the flag-flower shelters her delicate little
lovers from the rain. Another, such as the pea, coifs itself in a kind
of casque, whose visor must be raised. The bee establishes himself at
the bottom of these retreats fit for fairies, laid with softest carpets,
under fantastical pavilions, with walls of topaz and ceilings of
sapphire. But poor comparisons borrowed from dead stones! These things
live and they feel, they desire and they await. And if the joyous
conqueror of their little hidden kingdom, if the imperious violator of
their innocent barriers, mingles and confounds everything there, they
give him thanks, heap him with their perfumes, and load him with their
honey," says M. Michelet, in a brochure upon the insect, which, however
uncertain its statements, would be perfectly charming in tone and spirit
but for the inevitable sentimentalisms.
It is a brave companionship to which our tiny adventurer comes,
likewise,--a world of opening blossoms, a crowd of shining intimates.
There is the Chrysopa, a bright-green thing, with filmy transparent
wings wrought like the rarest point-lace, and with eyes redder than
rubies are; there is the Rose-Chafer, the little Cetonia of the white
rose, with an emerald shield upon its back, and carrying underneath a
breastplate of carbuncle; there are the butterflies,--the silver-washed
Fritillaries of June,--the Painted Lady, found in every clime, and
sometimes out at sea,--the Admiral of the White, peerless in his lofty
flight,--the Vanessa Atalanta of August,--the Purple Emperor of the
Woods,--the Peacock-tailed butterfly of the autumn; and there are the
beautiful, savage dragon-flies, with their gauzy wings of silvery green
and blue,--all flying flakes of living splendor, which seem to be only
flowers endowed with wings. And in truth the analogies between flowers
and insects are noticeable enough, between the egg and the seed, the
chrysalis and the bud, the wide-spread wings and the expanded corolla;
there is a vital principle enjoyed by both, individuals of both have the
power of emitting light, there are ephemera of both; as certain buds
always bloom at fixed hours, so certain moths break their coverings to
the minute; as there are flowers that part their petals only at dark, so
there are insects that fly only by night; there are plants that are
miniature barometers, there are insects equally sensitive to every
variation of the atmosphere; for fragrance there is the musk-beetle, the
tiger-beetle, which affords a scent like that of the attar-of-roses; and
whereas some blossoms have fetid odors, there is the little golden-eyed,
lace-winged fly to offset them. It is easy to detect the rudimentary
flower in the folded bud, thus the lovely little aerial butterfly with
its ocellated wings may be found all ready for flight wrapped in the
caterpillar that feeds on the wild strawberry,--the one has the freedom
of heaven, the other seems bound by the spells of some beautiful
enchantment; these Libellulae are sporting in the air, these sweet-peas
are just about to depart; there are locusts which appear to be walking
leaves, and finally there is the bee-orchis, which deceives even the
bees themselves.
It must fairly seem to this busy, bustling fellow, culling nectar and
ambrosia, that all outside is shadow, that the earth is made for him and
his kind, and that, let him cull never so tirelessly, he cannot hive
half its honey,--so that there will always be a drop or two left over
for his little poor relations, the violet-carpenter, the
roseleaf-cutter, and the poppy-bee. They have need of it, that drop or
two, to sweeten all the anxieties of their solitary lives the span of a
summer long, vagabonds at best, and not always allowed what
domesticities they have in peace. The pitiful fortunes of a mason-bee,
as told in "A Tour round my Garden," are liable to befall one as
another.
"Look at her," says the author, "returning home with her provisions; her
hind feet are loaded with a yellow dust, which she has taken from the
stamens of flowers: she goes into the hole; when she comes out again,
there will be no pollen on her feet; with honey which she has brought,
she will make a savory paste of it at the bottom of her nest. This is,
perhaps, her tenth journey to-day, and she shows no inclination to rest.
"All these cares are for one egg which she has laid,--for a single egg
which she will never see hatched; besides, that which will issue from
that egg will not be a fly like herself, but a worm, which will not be
metamorphosed into a fly for some time afterwards. She has, however,
hidden it in that hole, and knows precisely how much nourishment it will
require before it arrives at the state which ushers in its
transformation into a fly. This nourishment she goes to seek, and she
seasons and prepares it. There, she is gone again!
"But what is this other brilliant little fly which is walking up the
house-wall? Her breast is green, and her abdomen is of a purple red; but
these two colors are so brilliant that I am really at a loss to find
words splendid enough to express them, but the names of an emerald and a
ruby joined together.
"That pretty fly--that living jewel--is the 'Chrysis.' I scarcely dare
breathe, for fear of making it fly away. I should like to take it in my
hands, that I might have sufficient time to examine it more closely.
This likewise is the mother of a family; she also has an egg to lay,
from which will issue a fly like herself, but which she will never see.
She also knows how much nourishment her offspring will require; but,
more richly clothed than the bee, she does not, like her, know how to
gather the pollen from flowers or to make a paste of it with honey.
"She has but one resource, and that resource she is determined to
employ; she will recoil neither from roguery nor theft to secure the
subsistence of her offspring; she has recognized the solitary bee, and
she is going to lay her egg in her nest. It will hatch sooner than that
of the true proprietor; then the intruder will eat the provisions so
painfully collected for the legitimate child, who, when it is hatched in
its turn, will have nothing to do but to die of hunger.
"There she is at the edge of the hole,--she hesitates,--she
decides,--she enters.
"This insect interests me, she is so beautiful. The other likewise
interests me, she is so industrious. But here she comes back through the
air: one would think her a warrior covered with chased armor and a
golden cuirass; she buzzes as she comes along. The Chrysis has heard the
buzzing, which is for her the terrible sound of a war-trumpet. She
wishes to fly; she comes out; but the other, justly irritated, pounces
upon the daring intruder, beating it with her head. She bruises and
tears the brilliant gauze of her wings, and beats her down to the dust,
where she falls stupefied and inanimate.
"The bee then enters into her nest, and deposits and prepares her
provisions; but still agitated with her combat and her victory, she sets
out again through the air. I follow her with my eyes for a long time,
and at last she disappears.
"The poor Chrysis is not, however, dead: she gets up again, shakes
herself, flutters, and attempts to fly; but her lacerated wings will no
longer support her. What can she do to escape the fury of her enemy? It
is not her business to fly away; her business is to deposit her egg in
the bee's nest, and to secure future provision for her offspring,--but
the bee came back too soon. She ascends, climbing painfully: at times
her strength seems to fail her; she is forced to stop, but at last she
arrives,--she enters,--she is in! This time the interest is for her.
Then she was only beautiful, now she is very unfortunate. I am aware
that a long plea might be made for the other. I should not like to be
appointed judge between them. Ah! she is out again,--she flies away!
But, oh, how happy she is to have succeeded! Now I begin to feel for the
bee. The poor bee continues to bring provisions for its young, which,
nevertheless, will die of hunger."
Nor is the Chrysis her only tormentor, it may be remarked; there are
some frivolous little vagabonds of her own kind that never think of
building for themselves, but always appropriate the homes of others in
this style, and they are known as cuckoo-bees.
It is no wonder that the happy bee of the community, escaping all such
trial, makes blithe murmur to itself over its luscious labor. Perhaps
all artisans would sing as cheerfully, were their task as sweet; it can
be no such severe duty to fill one's basket with the bountiful store at
hand, when one has just banqueted on the very dew of the morning. There
are a few secondary products of Nature on which words cannot be wasted.
It is pleasant to recall the poetical charms of wine, its tints, its
aromas, and its sparkles; yet, with all that fire and fragrance, it
seems but poor, thin stuff, when poured out beside the heavy flow of
honey with sunbeams dissolved in every plash. The Hungarian huntsman may
praise his ropy Cotnar, fine ladies sip cordial Rosolio and Levantine
sirups, the fancy warm over African Constantia; but every peasant has
honey in his garden, and they buy it of him to enrich their best
Muscats. The great globes of the grape on which the wind and weather
have breathed a bloom, pulped with rain, and sweetened with sun, the
dew-drops slipping down among them as they stir beneath the weight of
some bird that springs from the stem into the sky,--these lend their
beauty and innocence as a kind of chrism to cover the profanities of
wine, which, before it can be used at all, undergoes a kind of
decomposition; but the wild wine of the bramble-rose has no need of its
youth in apology for its age. It is stainless honey still; the sweet
earth-juices stole up the tiny ducts of the flower to secrete it;
showers and odors, warmth and balm, distilled together into the nectary
to give it wealth and savor; it yet preserves the essence of long summer
days, of serene nights, of wandering winds, of mingled blossoms; it is
the link between vegetable and animal productions; it has undergone the
processes of a higher organization than that of the plant; it is, in
fact, the bee himself, and not all the art of all the laboratories can
reproduce it. Into all these other secondary products some stain of
humanity enters; but little sinless sprites of greenwood and glen alone
share the occult science of this with the blossoms. As light and heat
are the generative forces of the world, honey seems to be their first
result; it is lapped, indeed, in flowers, but it looks like candied
sunshine. From the beginning, it has been regarded as a sacred
substance; some have supposed it the earliest element of vegetation. The
ancients made offering of it to the souls of the departed; they
preserved their dead in its incorruptible medium; they sacrificed it to
the gods. "With honey out of the rock should I have satisfied thee,"
said the Psalmist, as if earth had nothing more to give. Nor has it to
our bee. Let him fill his honey-vesicle, he will regurgitate the deposit
into a cell that he closes with a thin waxen pellicle, or into another
already partially occupied by the farina of flowers, which he knows to
be perishable, and therefore secludes from the air in the same fashion
that the Romans used to seal their flasks of Falernian,--with a few
drops of honey at the mouth. Give him a grain of pollen, a taste of
stagnant water, a drop of honey, and kings could not enrich him. The
honey is his food, in the stagnant water he finds salts requisite as
remedies; but what the bee wants with the grain of pollen is still a
doubtful matter among apiarists. He makes of it a confection for the
brood, it is also an ingredient of the royal jelly, he eats it himself,
and he elaborates it in scales of wax upon his body, say those who
follow Huber; on the other hand, the brood receive no confection or food
whatever, there is no such thing as royal jelly, the insect will die
sooner than partake of pollen, and there is no wax elaborated in scales
upon the body of any bee, say those who oppose Huber. But if the brood
are not fed, one may ask, why does the wild bee, the tapestry, or the
carder bee, take such pains, before closing the nest where her egg is
hidden, to store there the little drop of honey? and what is it that
occasions the greater consumption of honey during the brooding period
than during any other portion of the year? It is really a pity, when
Huber has given us so many interesting relations, that people must needs
go prying into their truth. How is it possible that Nature could improve
upon them? Kirby, indeed, accepts them all, and hands them down to us;
subsequent encyclopedists have profited by his example; and Michelet,
who between a true story and a picturesque one never hesitates a
moment,--who tells us that the down on the butterfly's wing is a
collection of exquisitely minute balloons, and that the silkworm files
its way out of the cocoon with its eyes,--leading us to think, that, if
his great history partake of the nature of his lesser works, it must be
an assemblage of splendid errors,--M. Michelet out-Hubers Huber himself.
Contrary to these, Mr. Huish, a British author, declares that a rod
ought to be pickled for the man who dared impose such sheer inventions
upon the credulity of a weak-minded public; and although he does not say
it in so many words, he has evidently pictured to himself the
consternation with which Huber's wife and servant must have looked at
one another when he announced to them his intention of publishing a book
of the fairy stories with which they had amused him, and suffered him to
amuse his friend Bonnet. Huber has novelty, romance, and interest, upon
his side; Huish has certainly a little logic. The latter's book upon the
subject is, nevertheless, as quarrelsome an affair as ever was
published; he seems to be as choleric and adust of temperament as the
bees themselves; he contradicts every one who has dared to speak upon
the matter, and, while insisting that they could by no possibility have
seen what they pretend to have done, asserts opposing facts, which he
could no more have seen than they.
There is a close classification in Huber's system, the results of which
give us several ranks among bees,--those of the queen, the drone, the
jelly-maker, the artists in wax, the nurse, the harvester, and a certain
little useless black bee. Adversely to this, Mr. Huish, who would carry
bee-craft back to a pre-Reaumurite period, reverts to the original
observations, and declares there are but three sorts of bee in the
hive,--queen, drone, and worker,--which obviously simplifies matters;
while as for the little black bee, he regards it as existing nowhere but
in the head of its discoverer, so that, if the worthy person had not the
traditional maggot in his brain, he might at least be said to have a bee
in his bonnet. The sociable caterpillars, we are told, work as each one
pleases. John Hunter said that bees did, too; and here Mr. Huish is of
the same opinion,--this or that worker scours the fields or fashions the
cell according to the fancy that may overcome him. Him? That is exactly
the question. Mademoiselle Jurine, following the anatomical researches
of her father, promulgated the discovery that the common bee was a
decided female, with its organs undeveloped. To counterbalance her
statements, M. Epignes published a treatise in which he proved
satisfactorily to himself that the common bee is a decided male. Mr.
Huish insists that the common bee is a decided neuter. Discarding M.
Epignes with a fillip, Mr. Huish stoutly argues, against Mademoiselle
Jurine's theory, that the possession of organs destined to no use is an
incident out of the course of Nature,--to which, even were the statement
quite true, it might be added that the creation of a community of a
thousand males and one female is equally out of the course of Nature.
Mr. Huish insists, that, if these bees were all females, yet forbidden
the functions of their sex, it would be an anomaly; he forgets that the
existence of a neuter is already an anomaly. Allowing that Mr. Huish is
here in the wrong, as seems probable, it involves a slight trouble of
its own; for there would then seem to be need of but two kinds of eggs
in the hive, whereas it is well established that three kinds are
laid,--that of the male, the female, and the worker, or imperfect
female. Huber, however, in such dilemma, adopting the previous hints of
Schirach, at once seized upon Mademoiselle Jurine's discovery, and
assured us, not only that from the egg of a worker a queen could at any
time be produced, but enlightened us as to the manner of conducting the
experiment. The queen is dead? It is lamentable, but nothing so easy as
to make another. There is only to tear down some dozen cells, to set the
youngest embryo afloat in royal jelly, and a queen appears, who, if not
in the legitimate line, is capable of performing perfectly all the
office of a sovereign. There is a moment of intense despair, great riot,
and agitation; work is suspended; the temperature of the hive mounts
many degrees. All at once the old art is remembered,--the administration
of that delicious medicament, of so astonishingly affluent nature that
it can make a queen out of a commoner, the enlargement of the narrow
cradle to that ampler space which forbids the atrophy of a single fibre
of the body. The preparations are made; and, with tranquillity restored,
the people await the event. One day there comes a singular piping
sound,--it is the cry of the royal babe,--the hive is filled with
rejoicing,--there is no longer any interregnum of the purple,--the queen
is born! Perhaps the queen-makers have been too much in earnest, and at
nearly the same moment the inmates of two royal cells issue together.
Then is the time to try one's mettle,--no shrinking, no bias, nothing
but pure patriotism. Let a ring be formed, and she who proves herself
victor is worthy of homage. Is one of the two a coward? The impartial
circle bring her back to the encounter, bite her, tease her, tumble her,
worry her, tell her plainly that life is possible to her on no terms but
those of conquest. At length the matter decides itself; the brilliant
and victorious Amazon bends her long, slender body, and with her royal
poniard pierces the abject pretender through and through. Then these
satisfied subjects surround her, load her with endearments, cleanse her,
brush her, lick her, offer her honey on the end of their proboscides,
and, if there are yet remaining other royal apartments whose tenants
give notice of timely appearance, they conduct her on an Elizabethan
progress, in which, filled with instinctive dismay, she pauses at every
cell, and stabs her young rivals to death with her sting. As the story
runs, there are still other conditions to be fulfilled by the aspiring
princess,--she must give her people the assurance of a populous empire.
Should she fail in this, they have recourse to their old manoeuvres,
becoming manifestly insubordinate and unruly. If, however, they at any
time wax unbearable in their insolence, the young monarch has it in her
power, by assuming a singular attitude, standing erect at a little
distance, her wings crossed upon her back and slightly fluttering, while
she utters a shrill, slender sound, to strike them dumb, so that they
hang their heads for shame.
All this pretty story the later apiarists deem a tissue of fiction and
fallacy. If, when a hive is deprived of its queen, there happen to be a
royal egg remaining in it, they say, it will shortly produce a queen,
as, if it had been a common egg, it would have produced a common bee.
They insist that the organism of the creature to be produced is inherent
in the egg, and do not believe it in the power of a bee to alter a law
of Nature; they deny the statements of Schirach, Huber, Dunbar, Rennie,
and others to this effect,--scout the idea of the existence of such a
thing as royal jelly at all, with the supposed aristocracy of its
compounders,--share with Huber the amazement he says he felt, when, in a
time of disturbance, he distinctly heard a queen address her bees in
the French language, saying, "_Je suis ici, je suis ici_"--entirely
repudiate the royal duels, which the editor of the "Naturalist's
Library" himself, an advocate as he is of the Huberian principles,
confesses he has never, in all his experience, been able to
witness,--and go to the extreme of declaring, that, far from being the
truculent and jealous tyrant described, the queen is the most timid of
all creatures, flying, at the first intimation of danger, into the
depths of the hive, and never using her sting under any circumstances
through the whole course of her life, while, should you get one in your
hand, you may offer her indignities with impunity; she knows her value
to her people, and that, should she sting and be unable to withdraw her
barbed weapon, the effort would disembowel her, and prove her own death
and the ruin of her kingdom. The royal larvae, Huber tells us, in
spinning their cocoons, leave the lower rings of the body unprotected by
the gossamer envelope, that thus,--and it is certainly considerate on
their part,--the head being too well shielded by the hard nature of its
substances, and the cocoon endangering the safety of her sting by its
entangling flimsy threads, their queenly assailant may destroy them
without detriment to herself, by stinging that portion left exposed. On
the contrary, we are informed by his refuters, that, even were the body
destitute of this covering, which is not the case, it would present a
horny, scaly surface, from which there would be infinitely greater
difficulty in extracting the sting than from the silken meshes of any
cocoon,--and that, as no sting could pierce the waxen wall of the cell,
and as the royal cell is vertical, and the nymph lies with its head
towards the orifice of it, unless the queen, with her sting of the
eighth of an inch in length, had the power of darting it through the
orifice to the distance of three fourths of an inch, the act would be
otherwise an impossibility,--and that, to finish the affair, these
infant princesses are destroyed by the bees themselves, who, finding
them unnecessary for further swarming, tear them from their cells, and
despatch them, not by dart or venom, but, when they are in a
sufficiently advanced stage, by an attack of the teeth at the root of
the wings, in the same way that they despatch the drone, disabling and
dragging them out of the hive, after they have become supernumeraries,
where they drop to the ground, and, powerless to fly and escape, perish
with cold, or become the prey of bird, mouse, and reptile. It is
possible that none of the various tribes of all the tiny arm-bearing
people make use of the _coup de grace_ in their power, except as a last
resort. Still, when the bees find it necessary, they use it with Spartan
cunning. Bruin can testify to that in his sensitive muzzle; and thus,
when he takes a fancy to their conserve of blossoms, he carries off the
hive in his hug, and plunges it into the nearest brook or pool till the
bees are drowned, and all their riches made his undisturbed possession.
The bee that is not irascible betrays a dismal home and a miserable
mother; he has nothing worth fighting for. But far from him be malice;
unmolested, he does not molest. For one who has lived in an old mansion,
with bats' nests under the eaves and wasps' nests everywhere, waking in
autumn mornings to count the customary inhabitants of the latter
clustered on the cornices by threescores, while observing that they
always made themselves sufficiently at home, not only to claim a place
at table, but to walk across the cloth and help themselves, pausing
sometimes midway to flirt out the purple enamel of a wing for
admiration, and never giving offence to one of the house,--for one who
has seen this fierce and fell fury so prettily and quietly behaved, it
is pardonable to claim an equal amount of moderation for the sweeter and
purer nature of the little honey-maker, who has learned his gentler
manners of the flowers themselves. There are occasions, moreover, when
the bees positively forget they have a sting at all, as when, in
swarming, they are so entirely absorbed that they may be lifted in
handfuls. M. Lombard states the circumstance of a child's being cured of
her fear of the sting by an experience of this season. "A swarm having
left a hive, I observed the queen alight by herself, at a little
distance from the apiary. I immediately called my little friend, that I
might show her this important personage. She was anxious to have a
nearer view of Her Majesty; and therefore, having first caused her to
draw on her gloves, I gave the queen into her hand. Scarcely had I done
so, when we were surrounded by all the bees of the swarm. In this
emergency, I encouraged the trembling girl to be steady, and to fear
nothing, remaining myself close by her, and covering her head and
shoulders with a thin handkerchief. I then made her stretch out the hand
that held the queen, and the bees instantly alighted on it, and hung
from her fingers as from the branch of a tree. The little girl,
experiencing no injury, was delighted above measure at the novel sight,
and so entirely freed from all fear that she bade me uncover her face.
The spectators were charmed at the interesting spectacle. I at length
brought a hive, and, shaking the swarm from the child's hand, it was
lodged in safety without inflicting a single sting."
But however greatly opinions may vary in this branch of natural history
on one or another topic, the principal dispute is concerning the
relations that may subsist between the queen and the drones. Huber had a
complicated arrangement in reference to this, which his admirers
accepted enthusiastically, while Latreille and other apiarists reject it
as a cluster of prurient fancies. The opinion of Huish upon the subject,
which would seem to have more probability to support it than others
have, is that the queen commences to lay immediately on being
established, and that the eggs being in their separate cells, it is the
office of the drone to make them fruitful, after the custom of certain
fish and of frogs.
"When the population of the hive has been so increased by the opening of
the brood-cells that accommodation has become insufficient, and the heat
so unendurable that every wing droops wet and flaccid with perspiration,
as grand an emigration as those of the early Northern tribes is ordered,
scouts are sent out to select the future place of abode, and in some
propitious moment of perfect sunshine, honey-pouches full and nothing to
delay, the great exodus takes place with a noise as if the whole hive
were attacked by vertigo; and Homer himself could find nothing to which
to compare his multitudinous Greeks thronging from their ships fitter
than these nations of close-swarming bees. That the young queen should
lead the departing swarm seems the natural occurrence, being desirous of
fulfilling her own destiny and of hastening from a hive hostile to all
but one mistress whom they already know and love. Huber, however, will
have it that it is the old queen, who, outraged and indignant at her
treatment when a rival is allowed to live, sounds the alarm and sallies
forth with her adherents. In support of this Mr. Duncan mentions having
deprived an old queen of one of her antennae, and noticing her thereafter
at the head of a swarm, although Huber previously makes it known that
any bee deprived of one of its antennae is rendered useless. And in
opposition to it may be given the circumstance quoted by Mr. Huish, in
which the German apiarian Scopoli asserts, that, having clipped the
wings of a queen, he found her still in his hive after an interval of
many months, during which two excellent swarms had been thrown, and
rather plumes himself on the triumphant fact, as if by any possibility
she could have gotten away. A hive will throw off from one to four
swarms in a season, but the last two are generally worthless, and should
be deprived of their queens and returned to the parent stock. We have an
old adage to this purpose,--
A swarm in May
Is worth a load of hay,
A swarm in June
Is worth a silver spoon,
But the swarm of July
Isn't worth a fly,"--
and any one may verify it who chooses to investigate the condition of
such swarms at the conclusion of the harvest, when it will be seen that
those which founded their colony at so late an hour have not collected
sufficient honey even for their winter provision, and must be fed in
order to be saved till spring.
They have dainty appetites, these little people. They will work away
with their forceps at a bit of sweetmeat, but they can absorb only
liquids through their proboscides. Being in a state of civilization,
their food must be administered in a civilized way: it must be boiled
for them. They fancy stimulants; and sugar dissolved in ale, old brown
October, or, better still, made into a rich sirup with Port wine, they
find very delectable. Those authors who regard pollen as a part of their
subsistence deem that it is because they require nitrogenized
substances; and in order to prove that it is used as food, they remark
that the bees continue to harvest it so long as a single flower blows,
and that entirely after the formation of the cells has ceased. This,
however, may be owing simply to the instinct which prompted them in the
first place to bring it home, as instinct is generally in all creatures
stronger than reason and overloaded; and that it cannot be any portion
of the food of bees seems evident from the fact that whole hives are
known to have perished by hunger while still abundantly supplied with
bee-bread, as the pollen is often called. It is more probable that
pollen is really the chief constituent of wax, although Huber submits
that honey has that honor; but that this wax is produced in the manner
that Huber states is extremely doubtful. It is his opinion that the
wax-workers, having first gorged themselves with honey, suspend
themselves in festoons from the flowers, where they remain for
twenty-four hours,--which in a chilly spring night would break many a
link of the chain,--after which, one detaches herself from the festoon,
enters the hive, and takes up her situation, with her forceps detaches a
scale of wax from her side where it has recently exuded, works it with
her tongue, and fashions it to the required consistency, succeeded in
turn by others, artisan and apprentice. But as honey is the normal and
established food of bees, it would follow that these scales must be in a
state of perpetual exudation, and thus before long the hive would become
filled with them, unless bees have a control of their bodily secretions
enjoyed by no other order of beings. Anatomical dissection has found
pollen only in the second stomach of the bee, of which the mouth is the
sole and single opening; it is therefore presumed, that, being taken in
a crude condition, and having undergone its due elaboration there, it is
disgorged again and becomes the wax of the cells. This was the opinion
of Reaumur; and for additional proof, it is stated, that, though the
workers are seen to collect large quantities of farina during the season
in which the cells are being made, no particle of crude farina is
meanwhile to be found in a single cell, the whole of it being used in
their composition. All this, however, will long remain in uncertainty;
for, till some one is born with eyes of his own, ready to devote his
lifelong labor to such observations, and perhaps in the end be stung to
death for his pains,--since there are rebellions even in heaven, we
learn,--there will be general willingness to accept the most piquant
little statements regarding this most peculiar little people.
Wax itself is a substance that has no similitude to any other known. It
is now thought, that, as there are three orders of bee, so there are
three substances merely in the hive,--honey, farina, and wax. Pliny
enumerates three others,--commosis, pissoceros, and propolis. Of these
many moderns still retain the last, calling it a resinous matter
collected from alders and willows, and used for the more secure
foundation of the comb. But upon subjecting a lump of propolis to the
boiling process by which wax is purified, it turns out simple wax of
nearly its former weight; and it is accordingly presumed to be only wax
in a much more crude stage of elaboration. Dr. Bevan, in experimenting
with his hives, says that he melted wax and spread it upon a certain
place, and, while fluid, attached a slight guide-comb to it, which the
bees immediately adopted, suspending their whole comb thereby; from
which it is evident, that, wax being strong enough itself for a
foundation, propolis is unnecessary, and Nature is not apt to afford
superfluities in her economy of construction.
The beautiful geometry of the cells is, after all, the marvel of the
whole. Koenig demonstrated, that, in the problem of space and material,
the bee had at once arrived at the solution which he himself reached
only after infinitesimal calculations; and it furnishes fresh proof of
the great mathematical relations of the universe, when even instinct is
found to take on the accuracy and method of crystals. This honey-comb,
by the way, is a favorite figure in Nature. If one examines
microscopically the beautiful and brilliant petal of a gladiolus, it
will offer this cellular structure in loose and irregular outlines; but
under the same lens, the eye of a dragon-fly, which displays by daylight
a jewel-like transparency, will be seen a strict crowd of glittering
hexagons, with every alveole so closely arranged and so symmetrically
shaped as to afford instant testimony to the superiority of the animal
organization. It is by no means the habit of all bees, however, to
dispose their affairs with such precision, though many other methods may
have an equal grace. Don Felix d'Azara tells us of South American bees
which deposit their honey in small waxen cups, and are known as
Angelitos, because never using the sting; while the little black
stingless bee of Guadaloupe, which inhabits the clefts of hollow rocks
by the seaside, stores its honey in cells the size of a pigeon's egg,
each sacklet being filled only so far as it will hold without tearing
from its fellow, and a pretty piece of color being effected by the amber
honey in its receptacles of dark violet-colored wax which never
blanches, as the whole hangs together like a great cluster of grapes.
This is a species of bee not greatly differing from that which makes the
honey of Estabentum, that Clavigero says is taken every two months and
is the finest in the world. The Mexicans are reported to attend with
care to the culture of these bees, not so much for their rich honey as
for the wax, of which large quantities are used in their common church
ceremonials.
There are many singular incidents related by Huber, which, if they are
not true, one may exclaim, "The more's the pity." When he notes, that,
in a time of disorder in the hive, he beheld the queen ascend a royal
cell and seat herself upon it as if it were a throne, and, having
sympathized for a season, suddenly assume the awful attitude and strike
her disloyal people motionless, it interests us like some recital of the
haps and heroics of Boadicea and her Britons. It is remembered that in
the early days of what are known as spiritual manifestations, while one
wit thought our furniture made of Dodonean oak, another regarded the
manifestations as a wise provision, in aid of the customary May ramble
of city families from their respective domiciles. It is from a similarly
provident point of view, with the current price of coal, that we should
look at Huber's statement concerning the heat of a hive, when he tells
us that twenty hives will warm an apartment comfortably, and
twenty-five, occasionally well shaken, will furnish the proper
temperature for a conservatory,--which throws Count Rumford's feat of
boiling water without the aid of fire far into the shade. But when Huber
proceeds to say that the queen is followed on her rounds by a royal
guard, who wait on her with obsequious reverence, although it seems to
be a pretty custom enough, the actual custom may be found a far prettier
one: for the queen attends to her affairs, as others are assured, quite
unaccompanied; only as workers at all times cover the comb, when she
passes from group to group, each bee for a moment leaves labor, bestows
a caress upon its mother, offers her honey, refreshes her, sees her
pass to the next group, which hastens to do the same, while the first
returns to the business of the moment. The elder Huber taxes the
credulity, however, hardly more than his son does, in presenting a
drawing of humble-bees hindering a toppling comb from falling by taking
acrobatic postures, standing on their heads and supporting it with their
hind legs till relieved, converting themselves, in fact, into a kind of
flying-buttresses. Indeed, the trouble with all these things is, that
naturalists persist in endowing the little creatures with human
passions; and having once given the rein to imagination, it runs away
with them. Now and then they find themselves in a quagmire; but
sometimes the result is simply amusing, as in old Butler's most graphic
and entertaining description of the pillage of a weak hive by its rich
and powerful neighbor, in the "Feminine Monarchie." Yet these stories
have been told ever since the Flood. Aristotle assures us, that, when a
bee has a headwind to encounter, he ballasts himself with a little
pebble between his feet; and the Abbe della Rocca, who made observations
on the bees of the Grecian Archipelago, had the pleasure of witnessing
the circumstance in person,--which would cause one to conjecture that
the Greek bees, ever since they made honey on Plato's lip, have had
habits peculiar to themselves, were it not that the little solitary
mason-bee comes to the rescue,--the mason-bee, that, loaded with gravel
and material for her nest, both Aristotle and the Abbe della Rocca
undoubtedly saw. It is Virgil, however, on whom, in practical matters,
apiarists have not yet improved, who has told the most amazing stories
about bees, certifying that the body of their people may be bred from
decay, and particularizing the blossom on which the king of the bees is
born; but Virgil lived, it is to be recollected, nearly two thousand
years ago, and two hundred have not yet passed since Redi, sometimes
called the father of experimental entomology, first brought discredit on
the doctrine of spontaneous generation: having tried the recipe for the
manufacture of snakes, by his friend the learned Kircher, he could never
witness, he says, "the generation of those blessed snakelets made to
hand." M. Michelet, having a kind word for everybody, has a graceful
apology also for the errors of Virgil, avowing that this was not Horace,
the elegant favorite of Rome, nor the light and indiscreet Ovid, but
Virgil, the child of the soil, the noble and candid figure of the old
Italian peasant, the religious interpreter of Nature; and though he may
have been mistaken as to names, what he said he saw; he was simply
deceived, as subsequently Reaumur was for a moment, by the rat-tailed
larvae or sewer-flies, which, having escaped from their cradle of
corruption, now shining and adorned, are thereupon brevetted to the rank
of noble Virgilian-bees.
Certain superstitions seem to have prevailed in all countries ever since
bees were first domesticated. In England they must not be bought, though
they may be bartered; but there can be no haggling. In this country they
are not even to be bartered. As their homeward flight is supposed to be
westerly, it is necessary to obtain them from a place due east of their
future residence; and their first swarm is to be hived and returned to
the original owner, the bees relying on your good faith and working one
summer on credit, so to say: they are not slaves, to be exchanged for
silver. At this and all subsequent swarmings, it is requisite that they
should be stunned by a confused clatter of bells, pans, pebbles, and
cries, although it was long ago explained by Butler that this noise came
into custom merely in signal of the ownership of a vagrant swarm. When a
death occurs in the household, the hives are to be told of it and
dressed in crape, in Switzerland turned topsy-turvy, as without such
treatment the bees do not consider themselves used as a part of the
family, and will fly away.
Among all the anecdotes given, perhaps the best instance in relation to
the intelligence of the bee is that narrative of its stratagems in
warfare with the famous Death's-Head Moth. Mr. Huish, to be sure,
leaning upon Buffon, laughs at it, believes it on a par with Jack's
Beanstalk, and is grimly satisfied that no bees ever erected
fortifications of any kind other than as against the effluvium of
murdered mouse or snail when they wall up its source in a tomb of wax;
but it is impossible to look at the benevolent, bland face in any
picture of Huber, with its sweetness of expression, and its innocent,
wide, wandering eyes, and not wish to believe every word he says. M.
Michelet tells the story so pleasantly that it would be difficult to
quote it, especially as it is well to be credulous in good company.
"About the time of the American Revolution, a little before that of the
French, there appeared and multiplied a thing unknown to our Europe, a
being of frightful shape, a large and powerful moth, marked plainly
enough in yellowish gray, with an ugly death's head. This sinister
creature, that had never before been seen, alarmed the rural regions,
and appeared to be an augury of the greatest misfortunes. In reality,
those who were terrified by it had brought it upon themselves. It had
entered the country as a caterpillar upon its natal plant, the American
potato, the fashionable vegetable of the time, extolled by Parmentier,
protected by Louis XVI., and spreading everywhere. The _savans_
christened this stranger by a name not too reassuring,--the Sphinx
Atropos.
"This animal was terrible indeed,--but only to honey. Of that it was
gluttonous, and capable of everything in order to obtain it. A hive of
thirty thousand bees did not appall it. In the depth of midnight, the
voracious monster, profiting by that hour when the outskirts of the city
are weakly guarded, with a little dull lugubrious noise, muffled as if
by the smooth down which covered him, invaded the hive, sought the
combs, gorged himself, pillaged, spoiled, overthrew the stores and the
brood. In vain might the attacked party awaken, assemble, and riot;
stings could not pierce the covering,--the species of soft, elastic
mattress with which he was everywhere garnished, like the Mexicans of
the time of Cortes in their cotton armor that no Spanish weapon could
penetrate.
"Huber took counsel with himself for some means of protecting his bees
from this daring robber. Should he make gratings? should he make doors?
and how? That was his doubt. The best imagined closure possible had the
inconvenience of hindering the great movement of exit and entrance
always going on at the sill of the hive. Their impatience rendered these
barriers, in which they would entangle themselves and break their wings,
intolerable to the bees.
"One morning, the faithful servant who aided him in all his experiments
informed him that the bees had already solved the problem for
themselves. They had in various hives conceived and carried out divers
systems of defence and fortification. Here they had constructed a waxen
wall, with narrow windows, through which the huge enemy could not pass;
and there, by a more ingenious invention, without stirring anything,
they had placed at their gates intersecting arcades or little
partitions, one behind another, but alternating, so that opposite the
empty spaces between those of the first row stood the partitions of the
second row. Thus were contrived numerous openings for the impatient
crowd of bees, who could go out and come in as usual, and without any
other obstacle than the slight one of going a little zigzag; but limits,
absolute obstructions, for the great, clumsy enemy, who could not enter
with his unfolded wings, nor even insinuate himself without bruises
between the narrow corridors.
"This was the _coup d'etat_ of the lower orders, the revolution of
insects, executed by the bees, not only against those that robbed them,
but against those that denied their intelligence. The theorists who
refuse that to them, the Malebranches and the Buffons, must consider
themselves conquered. We go back to the reserve of the great students
of Nature, the Swammerdams, the Reaumurs, who, far from contesting the
genius of insects, give us numberless facts to prove that it is
flexible, that it can increase with dangers and with obstacles, that it
can quit routine, and in certain circumstances make unexpected
progress."
Intelligence among the inferior animals seems always more or less an
affair of acute senses; the bee certainly ought to manifest much of it,
for his senses are extraordinary. Not to speak of that singular sixth
sense of the antennae, by whose power alone he fashions his cell and
seems to make and receive communication, nor of his wonderful eyesight,
to which a double kind of eye contributes, one portion of it being for
distance and another for vertical objects or for closer work,--although
there are naturalists who consider these stemmata as a possible organ of
hearing,--he has a sense of smell which must surpass that of any other
creature on the wing: it is perhaps to this lively faculty that he owes
his marvellous cleanliness. Feburier states that at one time the bees,
attracted by the lemon-trees and flowers of Cuba, emigrated thither in a
body from the mainland of Florida, a distance of twenty-five
leagues,--the fact, however, being that their owners emigrated and took
them with them. But they have been positively known to track heath a
distance of four miles, and that across water, through an atmosphere in
which the faint scent of the heath must have mingled with all the
powerful salt odor of the sea. Strong little wings they must be, too, to
travel these distances, and yet perform all the other labor allotted
them; for every day, while some with their burdens are entering the
black hive, and some are darting out again into the glaring sunlight
full of business and on new errands, others may always be distinguished
stationed by the door and fanning their bits of wings backward and
forward in ventilation of the hive. Although disputatious to the last,
Mr. Huish insists that this motion is nothing but the expression of
intense satisfaction and joy. Either way, it would seem as if an
answering rest must be required in order to repair such wear and tear;
and on this point an old Spanish writer sets it down that bees sleep
during every night and on all fast-days in addition, and a corroborating
investigator remarks that he has seen them withdraw into the empty
cells, and, composing themselves, their heads towards the bottom, enjoy
the deepest slumber, the body gently heaving with the breath, and every
little limb relaxed,--to which another person replies, that this is an
outrageous statement, for it is a decided fact that sleep is as much a
stranger to the eye of a bee as it is to the eye of a herring. Yet in
the German countries much of the labor of flight is after all spared
them, their owners collecting them into caravans, conducting them
gypsy-wise, encamping here and encamping there, through whatever
districts linger latest in bloom. They build bee-barges, too, in France,
capacious enough for a hundred hives, and drift them down the rivers, so
that the bees shall follow the summer as it flits southward. And in
Lower Egypt, where the blossoming continues much longer than in the
upper regions, Niebuhr saw an assemblage of four thousand hives upon the
Nile; anchoring at places of plentiest pasturage: the bees thus float
from one end of the land to the other before they return and enrich
their proprietors with the honey they have harvested from the
orange-flowers and jasmines of the Said and all the wealthy banks of the
mighty river. The hunter in America takes advantage of this clear sight
and of this strength of wing when, he lines a bee to its nest, by
alluring one to a bait of honey within a circle of wet white paint,
watching the subsequent flight, letting off another, similarly secured,
at right angles to that, and looking for the nest at the intersection of
the two white lines. Nor is the hunter their only depredator. At the
Cape of Good Hope there lives a bird known as the Honey-Guide, that
enters into alliance with man, sounds its shrill note, and, fluttering
from spray to spray, leads the way to the sweet resort: it would be
sacrilege, if the Hottentot did not leave a portion of the honey to the
informer. There, too, is the rattel, a little beast that at sunset
shelters its eyes with a paw, for clearer view, spots a bee, and follows
it: often these two make fellowship together, the one for the honey, the
bird for the brood. But these are not the terrors of a temperate clime;
the hives can despatch a field-mouse unassisted; the master who cannot
rid them of the wax-moth they will desert without regrets; sounding the
slogan for aid, no two bees will hesitate to grapple with the bold
butchering wasp that invades them; the humble-bee, making her
underground nest, the poppy-bee, fitting her splendid scarlet tapestry,
however many each may have, recks of few enemies beyond the rain and
storm. What should any one of them all remember about the tomtit that
comes and taps outside and snaps each resident up as it appears
inquiring at the gate? of the little feathered monster that tears bees
to pieces, making shreds of heads and wings for his mere amusement? To
them a briefer memory makes brief life blessed. The happy murmurer of
our morning knows of little but peace and security, he does not even
dream that _savans_ infuriate themselves about him, he buzzes from
flower to flower, daringly puts aside the curtain of sacred shrines and
makes himself luxurious hermitage in the snowy depths of the lilies,
lets the south wind swing him a moment on the golden cradle of kingcups,
pursues his pleasures in the purple recesses of the hyacinth, or,
gliding into a labyrinth of petals, between the silken linings of
perfumed chambers, the tinted sunlight softly sifting through, revels
with the gracious nymphs that wait there, that hail him, caress him, and
give him their confidence all under the rose; he goes his way, and his
music spurns the trail of melancholy that never fails to follow the most
delicious warble that ever trilled from throat of bobolink or throstle.
As you lie and listen, in the golden tenor of the hive-bee's hum seems
diffused the wide whisper of continuous gladness; and giving the
innermost note of summer and of noon, the booming bass of the humble-bee
blazons abroad all poetry and beauty and sumptuous delight.
"Hot midsummer's petted crone,
Sweet to me thy drowsy tone,
Tells of countless sunny hours,
Long days and solid banks of flowers,
Of gulfs of sweetness without bound
In Indian wilderness found,
Of Syrian peace, immortal leisure,
Firmest cheer, and bird-like pleasure."