THE COMMONWEALTH OF THE HIVE
A DOCTOR DRYASDUST will manage to impart to the truths he meddles with a
disastrous air of dulness and stagnation; but to walk in a fools’
paradise of beautiful, artistic error is to lay oneself open to an
infinitely worse fate. There never was a truth in Nature that was dull
or uninteresting, except in its human presentment. There never was a
pretty worthless fiction that did not show its dross and tinsel when
brought out into the searching light of day. Romance, the spirit of
poetry, have largely changed their venue of recent years. The
unconscionable delver among old things, old thoughts, old conventions, on
the strand of Time, has tarried so long in his one little florid corner
that he is in some danger of being caught by the tide. He must soon
either mend his pace or swim for it. Human regard is turning more and
more towards those who deal in living verities—the men who search the
stars, who win new powers out of the common air, who find at last the
authentic teachings in the old worn texts of the stones and brooks.
These are the true poets, romancists, tellers of wondrous tales; and
these will hold the crowd—which is never far astray in its
intuitions—when all the singers of sick fancies and the harpers on frayed
golden strings have gone off in melancholy dudgeon to their own place.
The old story—which has held such a long and honoured position in school
text-books, and in the writings of those who tell of Nature’s wonders
from the commanding watch-tower of the study fire—the old story of the
queen-bee ruling her thirty or forty thousand dutiful subjects, and
guiding them unerringly in all their marvellous exploits and enterprises,
must go now with the rest. For the truth, as modern observers have
unquestionably established it, is that the queen-bee is no ruler in the
hive, but even a more obedient subject than any. The real instigators
and contrivers of everything that takes place within the hive are the
worker-bees themselves. The queen has neither part nor lot in the
direction of the common polity; nor has she any power, mental or
physical, to help in the carrying out of public works. Her sole duty is
that of motherhood, and even in this she derives all initiative from the
sovereign worker-bees. She is little more than an ingenious piece of
mechanism, and carefully guarded and cherished accordingly. She has
certain propensities, and certain elemental passions, which she can
always be counted on to exercise in certain well-defined and limited
ways. But as an intelligent, originating force she counts for nothing.
The mind in the hive is the collective mind of the whole colony, apart
from the queen and drones—an hereditary, communal intellect evolved
through the ages, the sum and total of all bee experience since the world
of bees began.
If, however, modern science compels us to divest the mother-bee of all
her regal state and quality, and thus destroy one of the prettiest
delusions of ancient times, it is only to take up a story of real life
more alluring and romantic still. In the light of new understanding the
old facts take on a mystery and excite a wonderment greater than ever
before. If we found the life of the hive an enthralling study when we
supposed it to originate from one winged atom endowed with acute and
commanding abilities, how much more fascinating must it prove when we
come to see that all this complex system of government is instituted and
kept together by the harmonious working of tens of thousands of reasoning
beings?
Reasoning—it is a big word, a double-edged thing that requires careful
handling. We have been so long accustomed to use it only in regard to
our own magnificent mental processes that it savours almost of the
ridiculous to bring it to bear upon such a tiny et-cetera in the brute
creation as the honey-bee. And yet, the deeper we go in the study of the
bee and all her works, the more difficult it becomes to find a word that
shall more fittingly meet the case. Instinct will not do. Instinct
implies a dead perfection of motive, born of omniscience, working through
unthinking, unvarying organisms to an equally perfect end. But in
neither project nor performance can the honey-bee be said invariably to
achieve, or even to aim at, perfection. It will be seen hereafter that
her motives, her methods, the results she brings about, all show
frequent, undeniable error or deviation. She attempts to carry through a
sound enterprise, but abandons it on finding unforeseen difficulties in
the way. She will persevere blindly in an obviously foolish piece of
business, and fail to see her mistake until both energy and resources are
at an end. Sudden emergencies may find her ready with the saving stroke
of last ingenuity, or merely plunge her into listless despair. Courage,
industry, economy, wise forethought, or still wiser afterthought, are all
common traits in her nature. But she may develop idleness, unthrift,
slovenliness, or even downright dishonesty, if chance or circumstance
indicate the way.
And what are all these but the defects or attributes of reason? If bees
and men, each admittedly rooted in divinity, be prone to the like
failings and inconsequences, who shall discriminate between them,
dividing arbitrarily natural cause and effect?
Watching bees at work for the first time through the glass panels of an
observation hive, or in the almost equally informing modern hive with
movable combs, this question continually arises, and there seems only one
answer for it. There is something curiously human-like in their
movements over the crowded combs, and the old comparison of a beehive to
a city of men is never out of mind. There are the incessant hurryings to
and fro; chance meetings of friends at odd street-corners; altercations
where we can almost hear the surly complaint and tart reply; busy masons
and tilers and warehouse-hands at work everywhere: a hundred different
enterprises going forward in every thronging thoroughfare or narrow
side-lane, from the great main entrance to the remotest drone-haunted
corner of the hive.
You will see the huge, full-bodied queen labouring over the combs from
cell to cell, with a circle of attendants ever about her. In the highest
stories of the hive the honey-makers are at work, pouring the
new-garnered sweets into the vats, or sealing over with impervious wax
the mature honey. Where the nurseries are established, in the central
and warmest region of the hive, the nurse-bees are hurrying incessantly
over the combs, looking into each cell to mark the progress of the larvæ;
giving each its due ration of bee-milk; or, when the time arrives,
walling up the cell with a covering that shall insure its privacy, but
freely admit the air. Here and there the young bees have awakened from
their transforming slumber, and are clamouring at the stoppings of their
prenatal tombs, gnawing their way out vigorously, or thrusting forth red,
glistening, ravenous tongues, eager to end their long fast. Where these
raw youngsters have at last won their way into existence, they can be
seen assiduously grooming themselves, or searching the neighbouring comb
for honey, while the nurse-bees are busy cleaning out the cells, just
vacated, to make them ready for the queen when she comes by on her next
egg laying round.
And all these operations are going forward simultaneously on an
incredibly large scale. Certain amazing scraps of information are given
to the wondering on-looker, which he hears, but can, at this stage in his
progress, seldom rightly estimate. He is told that the queen is the only
mother-bee in the colony, large as it is; that, in the prime of her
maternity, she will lay as many as 3,000 eggs a day; and that she has the
power to produce either male or female eggs, or none at all, at will. He
is told that, except when she leads forth the swarm, she goes out of the
hive only once in her life, and this is her wedding-trip. On this one
occasion she has traffic with the drone somewhere incredibly high up in
the blue air and sunshine of the summer’s day; and that immediate death
is her suitor’s invariable portion; that she returns at once to the hive,
and thereafter for the rest of her life, which may endure for years, she
passes her time in immaculate widowhood, yet retaining her fertility to
the end.
[Picture: Comb-frame from modern hive, with Queen]
She is pointed out to the gaping novice as she travels her unceasing
round of the brood-combs, and her various attributes are explained to
him. He is shown how much larger she is than the worker-bee; how her
bodily structure differs in a dozen important ways; how her instincts and
habits resemble those of the common worker hardly in a single particular.
Finally he is told something at which the most polite credulity may well
demur. Although the mother-bee is to all appearances of a totally
different race, the egg from which she was raised was identical with that
which produces the little worker. Her bodily size, the change in the
number and shape of her organs, her mental differences, are all due to
treatment and diet alone. There is no reason why she should not have
been an ordinary neuter working-bee, nor why any one of the thirty or
forty thousand little workers in a hive should not have become a great
queen-bee, the sole mother of an entire colony, save for the edict of the
communal mind. More wonderful still, the drones, the male bees—the
brothers, never the fathers, of their own hive, as has been so often
stated—owe the fact of their sex entirely to the will or whim of the hive
authorities, working through the docile agency of the queen. Until the
moment before the egg is laid, the question of the sex of the resulting
bee is held in abeyance. This big lusty drone, with exuberant
masculinity obvious in every posture and act; his totally different
organism; his incapacity for anything else than the fulfilment of the one
office required of him, for he cannot even entirely feed himself; his
habit of spending his life either in a comfortable lethargy of repletion
at home, or in amorous knight-errantry abroad—this drone might have been
a little plodding worker-bee, with shrunken yet elaborated body and
curiously developed brain, whose one idea in life is to get through the
largest amount of work before death claims her, and who is armed with a
formidable poisoned sting, while the drone has none.
It is useless at this stage to tell the learner that all these vital
differences—miracles, indeed, in the ordinary meaning of the word—are
brought about by the leading powers of the hive in certain simple, easily
explainable ways. He has lost, for the moment, all sight of and interest
in the details, however extraordinary, in the perception that has dawned
on him of the vastness of the entire plan. Here is a community that, to
all appearances, has solved every problem relating to the well-being and
progress of a crowded, highly organised society. Questions that are now
vexing socialistic philosophers in the human world, or are looming dark
in the immediate future—problems of numerical increase in relation to
food-supply, the balance of the sexes, communal or individual ownership
in property, due qualification for parenthood, the hegemony of might or
right—all seem to have been happily settled long ago in this remarkable
bee-commonwealth. In itself a prosperous, well-conducted hive appears to
offer a living example, a perfect object-lesson of what Socialism,
carried out to its last and sternest conclusions, must mean to human and
apiarian communities alike. Here is a number of individuals—counting
anything from ten thousand to fifty or sixty thousand, according to their
condition and the time of year—living heathily and comfortably in the
space of a few cubic feet. The principle, all for the greatest good of
the greatest number, is elevated into a prime maxim, to which every one
must bow. The fiction of royalty is maintained in harmony with the
perfect republican spirit. The females are supreme in everything, the
males in nothing. Growth of population is accelerated or retarded,
according to estimations of the immediate or future supply of food. The
proportion of the sexes is varied at will. The rule, that those who
cannot work must not live, is applied with relentless consistency. All
the garnered wealth of the State is held in common for the common good.
When the settlement becomes too populous, and the boundaries cannot be
extended, a large part of its inhabitants are forced to emigrate, taking
with them only so much of the state property as they can carry in their
haversacks, and relinquishing all claim to the rest. The governing
females have apparently agreed among themselves that only one of their
number shall exercise the privilege of motherhood; and when her fertility
declines, she is deposed, and a new mother-bee, specially raised for the
purpose, installed in her place.
All these, and a host of other facts as to bee-life, are crowded into the
bewildered brain of the tiro until its capacity is exhausted, and he can
take no more. He begins to see, at length, that he is approaching a
great matter too fast, and from the wrong direction. Like a scholar who,
resolving on a new and difficult branch of study, commences at the end of
his treatise instead of at the beginning, he finds himself in the midst
of terms and equations of which he knows nothing. All this desultory
peering into hive-windows, and listening to scraps of astounding
information, is nothing but opening the book of bee-life here and there
at odd disjointed pages, getting a swift impression of certain lurid,
kaleidoscopic details, but no grounding in the consecutive science of the
facts. There is nothing for it—if he be resolved to know the life of the
honey-bee truly—but to turn back to the first page of the volume, and
steadily work his way through to the end—if end there be.
* * * * *
All know the English honey-bee—the Black Bee, as she is called, partly to
distinguish her from her foreign rivals, and partly, it would seem,
because she is not black at all, but a rich brown—but all do not know her
origin. Probably she came to us from the tropics by easy stages, swarm
out-flying swarm, until the most adventurous crossed the English Channel
in remote ages, when it was only a narrow race of water, or even before
Great Britain was detached from the mainland.
It was the black bee, and not the motley-coloured Italian or other
varieties, who came to us thus, for the same reason, probably, that the
Celts came—because they were a hardy race, loving, and being more fitted
for the bracing northern atmosphere than the heat and languor of the
south. Modern bee-breeders who are trying so hard to acclimatise in
Britain the golden-girdled or silver-fringed bee-races of other lands,
might well ponder this fact. No keener controversy rages to-day among
English bee-masters than this one of the relative merits of native and
foreign stocks. But assuredly Nature has not erred in this respect.
South Down sheep can be reared in any county, but nowhere so fine as on
the Sussex Downs. The like principle holds good with the English bee.
The ages have evolved her from her tropic beginnings to make her what she
is—a doughty, essentially British creature, thriving against all odds of
fickle climate, when her more tender sisters from the south are hard put
to it for a living. She has held her own against them, and more than her
own. In bumper seasons, such as we get all too rarely, when, in sober
truth, the land is flowing with honey, there is little to choose between
the rival honey-makers. But through good and bad, early and late, for
steady, dogged industry, invincible hardihood, tangible results, the
English black bee has out-distanced all competitors. Thousands of years
have gone to her making, and thousands more may conceivably fit the
yellow-skirted Ligurian for British work. But labour for so remote a
posterity were altruism meeter for angels than for men.
In her old primæval fastnesses the honey-bee is little likely to have
troubled herself with hive-making, but to have hung her combs to some
convenient branch in the forest, much as the bees in India do to-day.
The habit of seeking some hollow tree or cleft in the rock grew upon her
probably as she advanced northward, and some nightly or seasonal shelter
became more and more an imperious need. The present-day customs of wild
creatures give some inkling of their ancestral ways, but it is in their
occasional aberrations from these customs that we get the truest
indications of what their original state must have been. Lost swarms of
bees, if they fail to pitch upon some better site, will often build in
the open, either suspending their waxen houses from some horizontal
branch, or making them in the heart of a thick bush.
The ways of the honey-bee are full of such deviations, due, perhaps, to
the working of old ancestral memory rousing dimly in the midst of modern
needs. The issue of a swarm may be nothing else than the survival of an
old process, vital enough in its day, but, under the present civilised
conditions of bee-life, lacking the whet of entire necessity. For, in
all respects, the life of the bee, ancient as it is, is an evolved
civilisation, and not a surviving, aboriginal state. It is conceivable
that the foxes have their holes, and the birds their nests, much after
the same fashion as in the days when Adam invented love-making. But the
twentieth-century honey-bee is not of this kind. The communal habit
itself may even have been a comparatively late introduction in her
progress. It is possible to get some idea of the path she won for
herself through the ages by studying the ways of creatures now living,
but immeasurably less advanced than the bee. There are distant
connections of hers—lonely little wood-wasps and others—which never
associate with their kind, but get through the short summer hours in
solitude, and die with the waning season, leaving the perpetuation of
their species to the children they never see. The common wasp is nearer
the honey-bee in development, but still infinitely far behind. The
fecundated queen-wasp comes out of her winter hiding-place, fashions a
cell or two in some hole in the ground, and deposits her first eggs, thus
laying the foundation of a colony which, populous enough in the season,
must nevertheless perish with the next winter chills.
In the primæval tropics the honey-bees may have lived in separate
families, each with its teeming mother, its indolent, lie-abed father—the
Turveydrop of creation—and its bevy of youngsters, every one going out,
when grown, to establish a home for itself. The modern bee-city, with
its complicated systems and laws, and its innumerable multitudes, may
have originated only when change of habitat and climate brought about the
necessity for a new order of things. Living in perpetual warmth, in a
land where blossom followed blossom in unending succession, there would
be no need for such co-operation. The one little family, snugging close
in its moss-roofed corner, could sustain its own temperature; and where
there was unceasing array of nectar-producing flowers, foresight would
have been folly: the winter larder would have been left to take care of
itself.
But as the young bees, leaving their homes, and flying ever northward,
came first into temperate zones, and then into the fringe of Arctic
influences, the conditions gradually changed. The perpetual
sipping-garden was left behind; and a season came in each year—short at
first, but inevitably lengthening—when there were no flowers. Hard
necessity must have taught the bee, then, first to gather together with
her kind for warmth during the cold season; and then, as this got longer
and longer, to make some food-provision for winter days that would eke
out endurance until the spring sun again wooed the earth into
flower-giving. Thus the first communal bee-nests must have been evolved
from the universal need of the race: the first common storehouses
instituted: a host of unforeseen difficulties and side-issues
encountered, and means for dealing with them contrived. The spirit of
invention must have been busy then with the race, and taxed to the limit,
of her resources. For never did Pandora open celestial casket upon earth
with more redoubtable consequences, than when the Great Artificer set up
the honey-bee as an examplar of city-building to the nomadic world of
men.
From the crowding together of the separate bee-families for mutual
protection against the elements, to a complete and permanent fusion of
life and interests, must have been only a step, as Nature works. But
then there must have been stirring times—social upheavals, educative
disasters, a cataclysmic war of sex. Bee-life must have been shaken to
its very foundations. When and how the woman-bee first got the upper
hand in the direction of affairs, it is unimportant to determine. But it
is certain that she got it, and has kept it ever since. The population
problem must have been the great, overwhelming one. With hundreds of
prolific mothers in the hive, each having enough to do at home in rearing
her own children, and a crowd of lazy, irresponsible drones who could do
nothing but dance in the sunshine or go a-wooing, how were the daily
needs of the hive to be satisfied, leaving out of account the provision
that must be made for coming winter days? It was clearly a case of
reform or annihilation; and it may be conceived that the woman-bees, in
default of masculine initiative, took the reins into their own hands.
It is a prophetic story. First they discovered their latent powers. The
harmless ovipositor revealed itself as a prime weapon of offence. Thus
the army was with the revolutionaries, and the rest was easy. A great,
far-reaching scheme was set afoot. Motherhood was to be a privilege of
the few and the fittest; work the compulsory lot of the mass. Hard times
had already bred a lean, unfertile gang among them, and it was discovered
that famine rations in the nursery meant a wholesale increase in these
natural spinsters of the race. Henceforth the little sex-atrophied
worker-bee was multiplied in the hive, while the fully nurtured mothers
were gradually reduced to a few—at last to one alone. It was a triumph
of collective self-sacrifice for the well-being and high persistence of
the race.
All this may be imagined as having taken place in infinitely remote
times, long before man succeeded in distinguishing himself from the apes.
In the honey-bee of to-day, and her life in the modern hive, we get a
sort of quintessence of the ages; a creature developed in mind and body
by her unique conditions, these conditions again imposing upon her unique
systems of life. Like Ruskin’s Venetian, she must live nobly or perish.
Much more is required of her than the role of domestic and political
economist. To make the modern beehive a possibility there must be
architects, mathematicians, and chemists within its walls. Sanitary
science must have its skilled exponents, or the hive would change into a
death-trap within a few hours. There must be land-surveyors ready to
explore the country, just before the issue of the swarms, to determine
for them their new location. There must be overseers, gang-forewomen,
everywhere to superintend every work in progress throughout the hive.
Above all, there must be a supreme central power, a farseeing
intelligence, to divine the imminent common need, and to set the forces
of the State to work, in right time and order, to provide for it. If all
these cannot be proved to exist in a hive of bees to-day, at least the
necessity for them is undeniable; and as undeniable, the achieved
results.