THE GENESIS OF THE QUEEN
IT has been said that the ways of the honey-bee are nearly all subject to
variation—that in bee-life there are few hard-and-fast, undeviating laws.
The rule, of one queen-mother only to each hive, appears to be more
absolute than any other, yet it is not without its exceptions. Well
authenticated instances are on record where two queens have existed
amicably in the same hive, each laying her daily quota of eggs unmolested
by the other, and, apparently, with the full approval of the
hive-authorities.
It is now also certain that a skilful bee-master can accustom his bees to
the presence of more than one queen. Recent experiments in America on
this head, although convincing enough as far as they go, need the test of
time before their practical value to apiculture can be rightly estimated.
To multiply its domestic deities may prove anything but a blessing to the
harmony and welfare of a hive. But the fact has been well established
that the old rule, of one queen at a time, may be upset—whether
permanently, and for the ultimate advantage of honey-making, time alone
can tell.
[Picture: Drone-brood and worker-broods]
A single queen, when young and vigorous and of good blood, is able to
keep an entire hive filled with brood throughout the short
honey-gathering season. The brood-nest of a modern frame-bar hive has a
comb-surface of over 2,000 square inches, giving about 50,000 cells
available for the breeding of young worker-bees. This represents, at
times of greatest prosperity, an enormous floating population; but if
several queens can be permanently established in one hive, and the hives
enlarged to permit each her fullest scope, the figures will soon begin to
stretch out into infinity. Two facts are well known to experienced
bee-keepers—that a large stock gathers more honey than two small stocks
containing between them the same number of individuals; and that, when
the honey-crop is in full yield, there are seldom enough bees to harvest
it. The whole art of latter-day bee-keeping consists in bringing up the
numerical strength of each colony to its fullest in time for the great
main nectar-flow. Yet, in a good district and in a good season, when
huge areas of clover or sainfoin come into full blossom at the same time,
and the nectar must be gathered or lost within the space of a fortnight
or so, the most populous apiary is seldom equal to the task. Probably,
in exceptional seasons, half the English honey-crop is lost for want of
bees to gather it. If, therefore, the new system of plurality of queens
both justifies and establishes itself, the near future may see a
revolution in all ideas relating to beemanship. All that can be said for
certain at present is that as many as five queens have been induced to
occupy the same hive in peace and quiet together; but whether this
portentous state of affairs can remain a lasting one is still to be
proved.
A curious and, to the expert, a startling outcome of these efforts to
break down an old and almost universal custom in bee-life, is that the
successful establishment of several mother-bees in a single hive appears
to lessen the swarming impulse. Hives so treated do not send out a swarm
so far as is known. One of the most disappointing experiences in
bee-craft is to see prosperous stocks breaking themselves up into several
hopelessly weak detachments just before the great honey-flow, when
strength of numbers is the one vital thing; and if plurality of queens
will prevent this vexatious evil, the old time-honoured custom is sure to
go.
The student of bee-life, watching the year’s work in the hive from its
earliest beginnings, and marking its steady, cautious development, will
readily see how the ancient idea of the mother-bee’s absolute monarchy
gained its vogue. The deception of appearances is all but complete.
Right in the heart of the winter-cluster he sees the queen bestirring
herself to lay the first eggs, and the bees around her slowly awakening
to the duty before them. With the passing of the weeks, he sees the
brood-area steadily enlarging; the hitherto close-packed throng of
workers gradually extending itself over a larger space of comb; the
water-fetchers increasingly busy; the pollen-gathering bees already at
work in the crocus-borders of the garden, where the year’s first gold and
white and purple is gaily flaunting in the sun. He notes that the
progress of the colony within the warm hive does not go by the calendar,
but checks with each return of cold, and forges ahead only when the
spring seems to be coming in right good earnest. He sees, even now, when
February is waning and the hazel-catkins fill the bare woodland with a
shimmer of emerald, that the colony still husbands its stores, eking them
out with a long-sighted parsimony that shall be more than justified when
the inevitable cold break comes in the flowery midst of the English May.
It is impossible to overlook the evidence of a wise, directing mind
through it all; and where should this be seated but in the brain of the
single large bee, courted and fed and groomed unceasingly by the
attendant host around her—she who is the teeming mother of past tens of
thousands, and who carries in her body the seed of all the generations to
come?
Yet the truth is that the queen-bee is the very reverse of a monarch,
both by nature and inclination. She possesses only the merest rudiment
of intelligence. She has a magnificent body, great docility, certain
almost unrestrainable impulse and passions, a yielding, womanish love of
the yoke; but she is incapable of action other than that arising from her
bodily promptings. Her brain is much smaller than that of the worker.
In a dozen different ways she is inferior to the common worker-bees, who
rule her absolutely, mapping out her entire daily life and using her for
the good of the colony, just as a delicate, costly piece of mechanism is
used by human craftsmen to produce some necessary article of trade.
In a word, the queen is the sole surviving representative of the
aboriginal female honey-bee. The aborted females, the workers, are
almost as much a product of civilisation as the human race itself.
Every step of the way now, in a study of the life of the bee, is hedged
about with wonders. It is seen that the common worker-bee is raised in a
cell allowing her only the barest minimum of space for development, while
the queen has an apartment twice as long as she can possibly need. The
worker-cells are so designed that as many a possible may be contained in
a given area, and their construction involve the least possible amount of
material. Therefore these cells are made in the form of a hexagon, this
being the only shape approaching the cylindrical—the ideal form—of which
a number will fit together over a plane surface without leaving useless
spaces in between. Moreover, the cells needing to be closed at the
bottom, half the material required for this purpose is saved by the
device of placing the sheets of combined hexagons back to back, so that
one base will serve for two cells. But it is not only in the
construction of the cradles of the worker-bees that rigid economy is
practised. From the moment that the egg hatches until the young grub
changes into the chrysalis state, it is given only the smallest quantity
of food that will support life and allow necessary development.
In the case of the young queen-larva, however, a very different policy is
instituted from the beginning. Not only is she given nursery-quarters
allowing every facility for growth, but she is loaded with a specially
rich kind of food night and day, until she actually swims in it. The
nurse-bees are constantly pouring this glistening white substance into
the cell for the whole five days of her larval existence, and the effect
of this generous diet is obvious from the first in her more rapid growth,
as compared with the worker-bee. A further advantage still is that the
young queen has perfectly free access to the air at all stages of her
development. The worker-cell is but sparsely ventilated, and that only
through the narrow top, all its six sides and base being absolutely
impervious. But the cradle-cell of the queen is not only made of a
porous material throughout, but it is commonly placed at the edge of the
comb, where it stand out in the full current of ventilation, the air
percolating the whole substance of its walls in addition to entering
freely at the large cell-mouth. Thus the main cause of the extraordinary
difference in the development of the queen-bee and the worker is that of
treatment; the one being given unlimited rich food and oxygen and room to
grow in, the other receiving only meagre workhouse diet, restricted
quarters, and little air to breathe.
Yet, making every allowance for the stimulating or retarding effect of
these agencies on the young female grub, we are still hardly any nearer
to solution of the mystery. We are compelled to believe that the egg
which produces the worker is identical in its nature with that from which
is evolved the queen-bee, because a simple experiment will at once dispel
all doubt on the matter. If the egg deposited in the queen-cell be
removed and an egg taken from any one of the thousand of worker-cells in
a hive be put in its place, the worker-egg will always produce a fully
developed and accoutred queen-bee. On the other hand, if an egg be taken
from a queen-cell and placed in a worker-cell, it will as infallibly
hatch out into a common undersized worker. It would be sufficient tax on
the credibility if the differences of queen and worker were only those of
degree. If the queen were nothing but a large-sized worker-bee, in whom
certain organs—which were atrophied in the worker—had received their full
development, it would be a fact within comprehension; but the queen
differs from the worker not only in size and the capability of her
organism, but also on several important points of structure. And how can
mere food and air and circumstance produce structural change? The worker
has many bodily appliances, special members ingeniously adapted to her
daily tasks, of which the queen is wholly destitute; while the physical
organism of the queen varies from that of the worker in several important
degrees.
Some of these must be enumerated. The abdomen of the worker is
comparatively short and rounded: that of the queen is larger and longer,
and comes to a fairly sharp point. The jaws of the queen are notched on
their inner cutting edge: the worker’s jaws are smooth like the edge of a
knife. The tongue of the worker has a spatula at its extremity, and is
furnished with sensitive hairs: the tongue of the queen is shorter, the
spatula is smaller, while the hairs show greater length. The worker-bee
has a complicated system of wax-secreting discs under the horny plates of
her abdomen: in the queen these are absent, nor can the most elementary
trace of them be discovered. In their nerve-systems the two show
difference, the queen possessing only four abdominal ganglia, while the
worker has five. The queen’s sting is curved, and longer than the
worker’s: the sting of the worker-bee is perfectly straight. On their
hind-legs the workers have a curious contrivance which bee-keepers have
named the pollen-basket. It is a hollowing of the thigh, the cavity
being surrounded with stiff hairs; and within this the pollen is packed
and carried home to the hive. In the queen both the cavity and the hairs
are absent. Her colour also is generally different from that of the
worker-bee, her legs, in particular, being a much redder brown.
Here is a problem for our great biologists—a problem, however, at which
the plain, every-day man may well flinch. For we seem to have come face
to face with new principles of organic life, facts incompatible with the
accepted ideas of the inevitable relation between cause and effect. The
irresistible tendency at this stage is to hark back; to repeat the
experiment of the transposed eggs, and see whether no vital, initial
circumstance has been overlooked. But the result is always the same.
Nor can the most careful microscopical dissection of the eggs themselves
reveal any differences. In this mystery of the structural variance
between queen and worker, it would seem that we are forced to accept one
of three alternatives. Either the egg contains two distinct germs of
life, one developing only under the stress of hard times, the other only
to the call of luxury. Or we must go back to mediæval notions, and
believe that the worker-bees give or withhold some vital principle of
their own during nurturing operations. Or we must give up the problem,
and decide that creation works on lines very different from those on
which we have hitherto grounded our faith.
The difficulty is further complicated by the fact that this change of
nature does not take place until relatively late in the life of the bee.
The egg is three days in hatching. But the young larva is at least three
more days old before nature has made the irrevocable step along either of
the divergent ways. For the experiment of transposition can be made with
exactly the same result if undertaken with female bee-larvæ not more than
three days old, instead of the unhatched eggs. Indeed, this is an
operation that the nurse-bees themselves perform, on occasion. If a hive
loses its queen, and it happens that all the eggs in the worker-cells are
hatched out, the bees will breed another queen from any one of the
worker-larva available. This is generally successful when the young grub
has not passed the three days’ limit. But, even when all the larvæ of
the hive are older than this, the bees will still attempt the task,
knowing well that, without a queen, the colony must perish. In this
case, however, the resulting queen will be defective in various ways.
Probably she will never be capable of fertilisation, and therefore the
breed of worker-bees will be cut off at its source. Unless the
bee-master supplies the colony with a new queen, properly fecundated, the
hive will gradually fill up with drones, the old worker-bees will die
off, and the stock must ultimately become extinct.
When once the study of the inner life of the honey-bee has been
undertaken, the watcher will soon realise that he has embarked on a
stranger voyage than he ever contemplated, even in his most daring
moments. In the old bee-garden there was a serenity, a quiet enduring
bliss of ignorance, that chimed in well with his slothful, holiday mood.
The sunshine, the flowers, the song of the wind in the tree-tops, and the
drowsy song of the hives; the voice of the old white-headed cottager
weaving in his listener’s ear the old, comfortable arabesque of error;
the sudden, jubilant uproar of a swarm, filling the blue sky with music
and the flash of unnumbered wings; the night-quiet, with its deep
underground bee-murmur, its dim half-moon peering over the hill-top, the
shadowy bent figure of the old beeman listening at hive-doors for the
battle-cry of rival queens, that should mean trouble on the morrow—it all
comes back to the watcher now as a haven he has left inconsiderately, for
a voyage over unknown, stormy seas. For now, with the inner life of the
hive going on unmasked before his very eyes, wonder succeeds wonder
almost without a break; and each new fact that reveals itself is more
perturbing, because more destructive of old, hallowed convention, than
any that has gone before.
The hive that has lost its mother-bee, and failed to provide her with a
fully developed, fertile successor, is seen to be rapidly declining in
its worker-population, while the horde of drones is increasing at a
greater rate than ever. But where do these drones come from, if the very
fount of bee-life has been dried up at its source by the loss of a
fertilised queen? The question brings the student to what is perhaps the
most remarkable fact in the whole great book of natural history.
We are not concerned, for the moment, with theological matters; nor will
the thread of the story of the honey-bee be laid down, however briefly,
for an excursion into the pulpit. Yet here is something that may well
give wherewithal for thought. For nearly two thousand years the Doctrine
of the Virgin Birth has been the centre of a bitter human controversy.
Its liegemen uphold it as a main article of faith, eternally exalted from
the odious need of proof; its temperate opposers sadly and quietly set it
aside as a natural impossibility. On one side the charge is want of
faith; on the other of blind credulity. And yet no one seems to have
thought of looking into paths of creation other than human, to see if no
parallel exists that may help both sides, and send the swords to sheath
before a common mystery. The honey-bee is small among the fowls, but
here she looms large in the world, a portentous symbol. It is a fact,
now incontestably proved, that the virgin queen-bee is capable of
reproducing her kind, yet only the male of the species. If she is born
late in the year, when no drones exist, and her fertilisation is
therefore impossible, or if some imperfection of wing prevents her going
out for her mating-flight, she will still set busily to work at her one
function of egg-laying; and these eggs will all hatch out into male bees.
The same thing occurs in the case of the queenless hive, which, having
neither worker-egg nor worker-grub, whose age is under the three days’
limit, yet tries to raise a new queen from a larva perhaps four or even
five days old. The queen thus created is queen only in name. She may
have her ovaries completely developed, but otherwise she will be
congenitally destitute. She will have neither the will nor power to
receive the drone; and the eggs that she lays so industriously only add
to the crowd of useless males that will soon be the sole representatives
of the doomed household.
[Picture: Queen-bee in breeding season]
Following the progress of a bee-colony through the mounting days of
spring, we see, with every week that passes, a larger area of comb
occupied by the young worker-brood; while about the middle of April the
queen pays her first visit to the drone-combs, laying a single egg in
each cell, as with the rest. It is commonly supposed that the queen is
always surrounded by an adulatory retinue, each attendant bee keeping her
head respectfully towards her sovereign, and backing before her as she
progresses over the combs. Something of this sort is constantly seen
during breeding-time, but at other seasons the queen ordinarily receives
little attention, passing to and fro in the hive with no more ceremony
than is bestowed on any other of the bees. The mediæval writers were
aware that the queen had these attendants, and believed them always to be
twelve in number, representing the twelve Apostles. A little
observation, however, will soon make it clear that the bees which
surround the queen on her egg-laying journeys are neither devotees nor
courtiers. They are actually her guides, her keepers. The queen’s
movements are all prompted by the incessant strokings and pushings and
gentle touches of the antennæ that she receives from these. Thus they
allow her free passage over the combs, but stop her at each vacant cell,
gathering close about her, evidently with the most absorbing anxiety and
interest in the operation. First, she peers into the cell, examining it
carefully. Then she rears; the bees give way before her; she takes a
step or two onward until the end of her body is over the cell. And then
she thrusts her abdomen deep into it, pauses a moment, mounts again upon
the comb, and the attendant bees at once resume charge of her, and
manœuvre her towards the next empty cell. This process never seems
hurried, and yet in the height of the breeding season it must go on at an
extraordinary pace. It is well attested that a good queen will thus
furnish as many as two thousand to three thousand cells in a day, which
gives an average of two eggs a minute, even supposing her to keep at the
work without pause for the whole twenty-four hours.
The cells designed to contain the worker-brood measure one-fifth of an
inch across the mouth; drone cells are larger, having a diameter of a
quarter-inch, as well as greater depth. The queen may pass from one
species of comb to the other, but she seldom makes a mistake. The egg
deposited in the worker-cell hatches out a female; that which is laid in
the larger cell becomes a drone, or male bee. Obviously the deposition
of the different kinds of eggs is well under the control of the queen.
It will be also seen that not only does the mother bee lay either male or
female eggs at will, but their number also is subject to her
discrimination. From the time when she begins ovipositing, until she
reaches her period of greatest activity in early summer, the increase of
the colony is not regular, but goes by fits and starts according to the
weather, or the amount of incoming food. If the new honey is steadily
mounting up in the storehouse, and pollen is plentiful, the work of
brood-raising will go freely ahead; but if unseasonable cold stops the
work of the foragers, this will immediately affect the output of the
queen, and under exceptionally adverse conditions egg-laying may be
entirely arrested. This may also take place in the height of the season,
and in full favour of sunshine and plenty, if the hive is a small one,
and the limit of its capacity has been reached. The combs will then be
full of either honey or brood, and the queen must wait until laying space
can be cleared for her. That she is able to do this—that her powers can
be augmented or restrained, according to the needs of the colony, and
that the proportion of the sexes in the hive can be varied at will to
suit like contingencies—can only be understood when the details of her
life-history have been passed under review.
In the normal, prosperous colony, which we are now studying, the queen
will be in her prime, and under natural conditions will remain at the
head of affairs until she goes out with the first swarm in May or June.
A queen-bee is at the zenith of her fecundity in the second year of her
life. After that, her egg-laying powers steadily decline, although she
may live to be four, or even five, years old. But the authorities in a
hive rarely allow a mother-bee to retain her position after she has shown
signs of waning energy. Preparations are at once set on foot for the
raising of another queen.
A very old queen will have lost her power to lay worker-eggs, and will
have become nothing but a drone-breeder. But the bees are seldom caught
napping in this way. Long before this happens the building of the royal
cells will have commenced in the hive. A queen-cell has been likened, by
various writers, to an acorn, and when half completed it bears a very
close resemblance, both in size and shape, to an inverted acorn-cup.
This is commonly hung mouth downwards at the side or base of one of the
central brood-combs, but it may be placed right in the middle of the
comb, in which case the cells around it are cut away to give it air and
space. Whether the old queen herself deposits the egg in the royal
cell—thus unwittingly supplying the means for her own future
dethronement—or whether the worker-bees transfer to it an egg or grub
from a common cell, is not yet finally ascertained. As, however, the
mere sight of a royal cell usually excites the queen to fury, the chances
are that she is never allowed to approach it at any time, and the egg
would then be placed there by the worker-bees. But, in the great
majority of cases, it is probable that new queens are raised by enlarging
an already existing worker-cell, in which an egg has been previously
deposited. As far as is known, this is always the case when a young grub
is used for the purpose instead of an egg. It is possible, also, that
the queen is physically incapable of laying in a royal cell an egg that
will produce a female bee; but this curious point will be touched upon at
a later stage.
[Picture: A Queen-cell]
The old trite saying among beemen, that bees never do anything
invariably, receives constant illustration in any near study of the ways
of the honey-bee. It has been seen that a colony deprived of its queen,
and having no worker-egg or grub less than three days old wherewith to
make good its deficiency, is commonly doomed to early extinction. But,
on rare occasions, colonies supposed to be in this plight will make an
unexpected and inexplicable recovery. After a period of the doldrums,
extending for three weeks or more, a sudden renewed activity and
exhilaration is observable in the hive. The pollen-bearers, who have
been hitherto almost idle, resume their busy work; and, on the hive being
opened, all the evidences of the presence of a fertile, laying
queen-mother are again to be seen. In many instances in which a new
lease of life has thus been vouchsafed to a colony under what seems an
inexorable ban, no doubt appearances have been deceptive. The bees may
have discovered in their midst a worker-larva not yet too far advanced
for promotion to queenship, and thus have achieved their salvation at the
eleventh hour. But, in at least one case, the testimony against the
possibility of this seems complete. A nucleus stock, containing only
three or four small combs and only about five hundred bees, was deprived
of its queen. Ten days later every queen-cell that had been formed in
the interval was destroyed, leaving in the hive not a single egg or bee
in the larval state. Nevertheless, on the hive being opened after a
further period of eighteen days, one new queen-cell containing an egg was
discovered. And this egg duly hatched out into a fine, well-developed
queen-bee. Assuming the facts to be true, and they seem to be
incontrovertible, there is only one inference to be drawn from this: some
enterprising bee of the colony must have gone to another hive and either
begged, borrowed, or stolen a worker-egg. Apiarian scientists very
rightly hesitate to ascribe to the honey-bee surpassing ingenuity of this
kind on the testimony of a single case, however well authenticated. But
other instances are on record nearly as indubitable, and as it is an
unquestioned fact that worker-bees will carry eggs about from comb to
comb within the space of their own hive, it does not seem wholly
incredible that they may visit other hives in the immediate
neighbourhood, especially when impelled to extra resourcefulness by so
vital a need. The whole question is interesting in more ways than one,
as it seems to bear very trenchantly on the problem of “Reason versus
Instinct,” now busy in the thoughts of most modern naturalists.
In whatever way the egg for the queen-cell may be furnished by the stock
intending to raise a new mother-bee, the first sign of life is always the
same—a tiny, white, elongated speck, glued on end to the base, or what
must rather be called the roof, of the inverted cell-cup. In this state
it remains about three days, when the larva hatches out, and at once the
special treatment accorded to the young queen begins. She is loaded with
rich provender from the first moment of her existence, living literally
up to the eyes in the white, shining, jelly-like substance that the
nurse-bees are continually regurgitating and pouring into the cells.
This superfeeding process is continued for about five days, when the
larva has reached its full growth and the cell its greatest dimensions.
The larva then stops feeding to spin itself a silken shroud before
changing into the pupa state, and the bees seal up the door of the cell.
In its completed state the cell loses its resemblance to an acorn, and is
rather to be likened to a fir-cone. In the case of the common workers
and drones, the cells are made of pure wax, only the capping being of
mingled wax and pollen; but the queen cell is constructed throughout of
this porous material.
The fully grown queen-bee is ready, and more than anxious to leave her
cradle-cell in about fifteen or sixteen days after the laying of the egg.
The bees, however, generally give her a first lesson in obedience even at
this early point in her career. It is a critical time in the history of
the hive, and much thought and care have been bestowed on the complicated
business in hand. In the first place, it would never have done to allow
the whole future welfare of the colony to depend on a single life alone.
Therefore not one queen has been raised, but several. As many as five or
six queens may be ready to hatch out in different parts of the
brood-nest, and none of them will be permitted to break from her cell
until the appointed time arrives. For each the cradle now becomes a
prison. A small hole is bored in the cell-wall, through which the
impatient captive is fed, pending the day when she is to be allowed her
liberty; and close guard and watch is kept over each cell to save it from
the violence of the old queen, who is becoming hourly more restless and
suspicious.
The complete subjection of the mother-bee to the ruling worker-class in
the hive receives here a striking confirmation. She is a true exemplar
of a prevailing kind of femininity—comely of person, untutored in mind,
an inveterate stay-at-home, a prolific mother; and now there awakens in
her the sounding chord of jealousy. Left free to act on her own
impulses, she would soon bring about a speedy end to all the careful,
long-sighted preparations within the hive. She would tear open each
royal cell, and with one thrust of the curved, cruel scimitar that
queen-bees use only on their equals in rank, its occupant would be
ruthlessly despatched, and her own supremacy reinstated. But an
impassable barrier stops the way—the collective will of the hive. The
violent delight of killing has once been hers; she will never know it
again. Now her own fate is in the balance. It may be death, or a new
life in a new home: all depends on the deliberate decree of those who
have made her, and who now use or discard her, for their own purposes.
If it be late spring, and the condition of the stock warrant it, this
governing spirit may decide for colonisation, and the old queen may be
disposed of by sending her off with a swarm. But other counsels may
prevail. The times may be unripe, or the weather inopportune. And then
Fate, in the shape of a merciless application of principles, will descend
upon her, and her own wise children will ruthlessly put her to death.
This State-execution of the queen, at the first sign of waning fertility,
is a peculiarly pathetic as well as a tragic phase of bee-life. The
stern, soured amazons of the hive must have their systems and conventions
in everything they undertake; and they cannot even bring about the
supersession of the old queen without due circumstance and ceremonial.
Given that it would be against the best interests of the common weal that
she should retain her life after the loss of her queenhood, one swift
stroke would immediately determine the matter, and the law—that there
shall be no useless members in the bee-republic—would have its due
fulfilment. But old tradition rules that the queen shall suffer no
violence from the weapons of the common herd. She is to die, but her
death must be brought about in another way. And so the fawning
executioners gather round her, locking her in an embrace that tightens
with every moment, until the breath is literally hugged out of her body.
All her life has been spent in the midst of caresses, and now she is to
die of them, close held to the last in that silent, terrible grip.