THE BRIDE-WIDOW
IN the heat and glow of the fine June morning you may see her, the young
virgin queen, making ready for her nuptial flight.
At first she is all hesitancy; wandering to and fro amidst the crowd on
the hive-threshold; coquetting with the sunshine; loath to return to the
dim, pent, murmurous twilight she has forsaken, yet hardly daring to
launch herself on wings that are still untried.
For three long days and nights since her release from the prison-cell she
has been a curiously solitary figure in the busy throng within the hive.
Instead of the enthusiastic, welcoming world she expected, she finds none
but unregarding strangers about her. Not a drone glances her way, and
the worker-bees go upon their business in seeming unconcern at her
presence. They do not even trouble themselves to feed her, and she is
left to forage for herself as best she may. A conspiracy of indifference
is on the clan—all part of a deep design for her education, if she only
knew it, but singularly damping to the ardours, and great ideas of
destiny, that gather within her day by day. At length the call comes for
which all are secretly waiting, and obeying irresistibly, she presses out
into the light.
As she stands hesitating, the hot June sun falls upon her, laving her in
molten gold. The blue sky beckons her upward. All the world of colour
and incense and life calls her to her wooing, and she must needs obey.
With a little glad flutter of the wings, she breaks at last from the
scrambling company about her, and soars up into the light.
Warily now she hovers, taking careful stock of her home and its
surroundings. Then round and round, in ever widening and lifting
circles, each sweep upward giving her a broader view of the world that
lies beyond. And then away into the blue sky so swiftly that no human
eye can follow; yet only for a short flight. She is back again now,
almost before you have missed her, and hurrying, frightened at her own
audacity, into the old safe gloom of the hive.
Thus she dallies, to and fro between the sunshine and the darkness, each
time adventuring a little farther into the blue playground of the upper
air, until at length the inevitable comes to pass. A great drone—one of
the roistering crowd that fills the bee-garden with its hoarse noontide
music—spies her, and gives instant chase. At sight of him she wheels,
and darts away into the sunshine at lightning speed. Yet the first drone
has hardly stretched a wing before another is after him, and still
another. Thick and fast from all points they gather for the race, until
the fleeing queen has drawn a whole bevy of them, streaming like a little
grey cloud behind her. This much you can see as you strain your eyes in
their track; but in a moment quarry and huntsmen have vanished together,
volleying, as it seemed, straight up into the farthermost skies.
From her birth to the day when that terrible, living cordon closes about
her, almost the whole life of the queen-bee can be followed step by step.
Only this one moment of her bridal stands unrevealed, and perhaps for
ever unrevealable, to human eyes. You can picture to yourself the wild
chevy-chase through the clear June air and sunshine; you can give, in
fancy, the prize to the strongest and the fleetest; but all you will know
for certain is that in a little while the queen returns to the hive,
sobered and solitary, trailing behind her infallible evidence of her
impregnation and the death of the victorious drone. She has been the
bride of a moment; now she is to be the widow of a lifetime.
Henceforward her days are to be spent in the twilight cloisters of the
hive, flying abroad so rarely that many an old experienced beeman will
say she comes forth only once a year when she leads a swarm. But in her
body now she carries the seed from which will spring up a whole nation.
Before her marriage-flight she was the least considered of all the
colony; now she is welcomed home with public ovation; lauded, fed, and
fondled; set up in the high place, a living symbol of the tens of
thousands unborn. As in olden, savage times, the royal festivals had
their human sacrifices, so this paramount day in the perfected communism
of the bee-people must vent its rejoicing in slaughter. But it is not
tribute of common slaves that is now to redden the State-shambles, nor
will the work fall to the common executioner’s knife. There are captive
queens in the citadel—a royal sacrifice ready to hand, and a royal blade
hungering for the task. Once the queen has proved her intrinsic
motherhood, and the first few worker-eggs have been laid in the comb, the
guards will stand away from the royal prison-cells and let her wreak her
will upon them. It is all very ghastly in a miniature way, yet very
queenly, as old traditions of human queenhood go. She gives over her
nursery-work gladly enough for a moment, and flies to the slaughter,
tearing down the prison-doors, and putting each clamorous captive
fiercely to the sword.
Apart from this tragic element of sororicide, quickly over and soon
forgotten in the general rejoicing, there is true romance in the early
life-story of the Queen of the Bees—bridehood, wifehood, widowhood,
following hard upon each other, all in the space of a single hour. But
in the details of her common everyday life that succeed this tense
period, above all in the wonderful structure of her body and its
functions, there is greater romance still. That she has but a single
commerce with the drone, and thereafter is exalted to perpetual
fecundity; that, through her, sons and daughters can be given to the hive
in just the proportion needed for the good of the State, or that increase
of population can be wholly arrested at will, are facts to be accredited
only after sure knowledge. And to understand how these results are
brought about, it is necessary to learn something of the anatomy, as well
as the manner of fecundation, of the mother-bee.
In the first place, as fertilisation of the one sex by the other is
usually regarded, the queen-bee is not fertilised at all. The vital
essence of the drone does not penetrate the ovaries of the queen, but
passes immediately after coition into a receptacle specially provided for
it, where it is stored, and its effectiveness preserved, during nearly
the whole lifetime of the queen. It has been shown that the virgin queen
is able to lay eggs from which only drones, or male bees, originate. The
fecundated queen, however, can lay both male and female eggs, and she has
the power of depositing either kind when and wherever she wills. The
whole thing, amazing as it is, and far-reaching in its results, has, like
many other extraordinary devices in nature, a simple explanation. The
gland wherein is stored the male life-essence, can be opened or closed at
the will of the mother-bee, or rather, as will be shown, according to
circumstances that for the moment involuntarily but inexorably guide her.
When she is brought to the large drone-cell, this gland remains shut, and
the egg escapes without contact with its contents. But at the narrow
worker-cells the gland in the oviduct is opened, and the egg, in passing,
absorbs some of its containing germs. Thus only the female bee is born
of the union of the two parents; the male bee is the offspring of mother
alone.
Of this primal incident, the parthenogenesis, or birth of the fully
equipped male from the virgin female, little more can be said than that
it is a well-ascertained fact of nature, exemplified in several other
insects beside the honey-bee. But while we are witnessing the part
played in the hive by the fecundated queen, with her elaborate organism,
much is to be noted; and here we really get the master-key to a right
understanding of the whole system of bee-government. It would be an
anomaly if the highest, most important functions of the State had been
entrusted solely to the queen, whose feeble intelligence renders her, of
all others, least likely to execute them properly; and we find, in fact,
that no such reliance is placed on her. The worker-bees, who take her in
charge on her return from her mating-flight, henceforth originate her
every act and impulse. It has already been seen how she is led from cell
to cell over the combs; how she is caused to lay, in earliest spring,
only a few eggs a day, while in the summer she may produce several
thousand; and how her output may be checked or augmented at any point
between. Now we are to realise how it is all brought about; or, at
least, bring conjecture as near to certainty as may be with so difficult
a theme.
During the first two days of her life as a perfect insect, we saw the
young virgin queen mingling with the throng in the hive almost unnoticed,
and left to seek her own food from the common store like the rest. But
now that her fecundation has been achieved, she has a whole suite of
chamber-women, whose principal duty is to attend to her nourishment.
From their mouths they feed her, giving her, in all probability, the same
rich substance that was administered to her when but a larva in the cell.
This bee-milk consists mainly of honey and pollen pre-digested, but it
has been proved that its composition can be altered at will by the
ministering bees. Additions to it are made, either separately, or
combined in varying proportions, from three or four distinct glands, each
of which exudes a liquid differing in nature from that of the rest. The
particular kind of nourishment given to a queen who is to be urged on in
the work of egg-laying, has the effect of stimulating her ovaries. The
more food of this kind she receives, the greater will be her prolificacy.
On the other hand, a diminishing allowance will mean a corresponding
decrease in her egg-laying powers; while, if this rich diet be withheld
altogether, and she is forced to help herself from the honey-cells, the
development of these eggs may cease entirely, as it actually does in the
coldest time of the year. Thus the bees play upon her, producing just
the music needed for their purposes. As the days lengthen, and the
spring sun gets higher and warmer, they gradually waken her docile nature
to its one paramount task. In the flaming weeks of summer she sits at an
unending banquet. And when autumn comes, with its chilly nights and
steadily failing sun-glow, the generous fare is slowly withdrawn; her
retinue thins and disperses; at length she becomes a solitary, unmarked
wanderer again, sipping, with the commonest worker, at the plain
household sweets.
How the proportion of the sexes is so unerringly regulated by the
hive-authorities through their influence on the mother-bee, is not so
readily explained; nor can it be at present more than shrewd conjecture,
a backward reckoning from effect to cause. Probably the opening or
closing of the fertilising gland, which decides the sex of the egg, is
automatic, the attitude of the mother-bee during oviposition determining
its action. When she enters the narrow worker-cells, her body is
necessarily straightened, and this may produce pressure on the
fecundating gland, resulting in the impregnation of the egg. But in the
wider drone-cell no such constricted posture is needful, and the egg may
therefore pass untouched by the fructifying germ. If this version of the
matter be accepted, the natural inference is that either the mother-bee
is incapable of laying female eggs in the cells specially constructed for
raising queens—these being the largest of all,—or that there is something
in the peculiar curve of the cell-cup which compels her to straighten her
body in the act, and so brings about the same posture as with the narrow
worker-cells.
This theory, although at present the most plausible, has received, it is
true, little confirmation in fact. No one, apparently, has ever seen the
mother-bee lay in a queen-cell, nor has the transportation thither of a
worker-egg by the bees actually been witnessed. To cling to the old idea
of the supremacy of the queen-bee, giving her the power and ability of a
despotic, all-wise sovereign, would, of course, set this and many other
vexed questions at rest. Nothing, however marvellous, would be too much
to expect of her. But the farther the student of bee-life goes in his
absorbing subject, the more impossible the old notion seems. Proof comes
to him with every hour that the mother-bee is virtually a servant, and
never a ruler in the hive; and just as assured testimony reaches him of
the universal potency of the worker-bees. All else that takes place
within the hive is brought about by their collective will and agency; and
it would be strange indeed if this vital matter of progeneration were not
subject to the same controlling force.