THE SOVEREIGN WORKER-BEE
WATCHING the inner life of the hive in the season of its full activity,
it is not the untiring spirit of industry pervading the whole
bee-commonwealth that most excites the student’s wonder, but rather the
fact that this ceaseless diligence finds so many outlets—that so many
different kinds of necessary work are going forward at one and the same
time.
Between the brood-combs the nurses are feeding the young larvæ, or
clearing out the empty cells, or sealing over the full-grown nymphs for
their pre-natal slumber. Hard by, the sowers are at their vital work,
driving their living seed-barrow, the queen, over the combs. Elsewhere
the wax-makers hang in a silent, densely packed cluster. Overhead, the
new honey-combs are growing; the masons building up the cell-walls, while
the engineers devise means and ends, calculate strains, put in a strut
here, a stay there, or flying buttress from one comb to another, or cut
new passageways where the traffic seems too congested for the old
thoroughfares of the hive.
On all sides the scavenging bees go to and fro, picking up every particle
of refuse, and carrying it safely away. Winged undertakers drive their
trade in the midst of the throng, bearing the corpses of their comrades,
old and young, towards the entrance, and flying away with them into the
sunlight of the young spring day. There is the ventilating army outside
the city gates, skilfully organised in relays, so that, day and night, a
constant circulation of air is maintained. There are the guard-bees
close by, watching all in-comers and out-goers. There is a sort of
General Purposes Committee ready outside the threshold with a helping
hand for all: succouring the overladen, grooming down any in need of such
assistance, gathering up fallen treasure, or, as it would seem, taking
careful note of the weather for their next official report. And all
through the hours of sunshine, in unnumbered thousands, the foragers are
charging to and fro, some bringing nectar, some staggering in under
mighty loads of pollen, others with full water-sacs, still more dragging
behind them lumps of the curious cement called by the ancients Propolis,
and used for so many different purposes in the daily work of the hive.
[Picture: The honey-bee (enlarged) from life: and as some ancient
draughtsmen depicted them]
And it all goes on with the regularity of a well ordered human
settlement. There is complexity, yet no confusion; there is speed
without hurry Each busy gang of labourers has apparently a distinct and
definite task allotted to it by the central hive-authority; co-operation
and progress are, to all appearances, deified cause and effect in all the
affairs of the hive.
It is easy—nay, inevitable—in any close study of bee-life with the help
of the modern observation-hive, to overset the ancient idea of absolute
bee-monarchy under a single king or queen. But it is not so easy to
determine how the general government of the colony is actually carried
on. Innumerable small consultations on minor matters are seen to take
place on every side during each moment of the busy day; but nothing like
general communication is ever visible. And yet, how are the great
national movements, such as the despatch of a swarm or the supersedure of
an old queen, brought about; how are the various common crises of the
State met, and provided for? The only rational inference seems to be
that each worker is in herself the perfect evolved presentment of
republicanism, in whom all imaginable difficulties in collective life
have their best solution, tried and proved through the ages, and resorted
to unerringly as a matter of course. Thus a common need is felt, and met
instantaneously by a common, recognised expedient. The judgment of one
is necessarily the judgment of all. Every problem of daily life, however
intricate, is solved by the one device, brought to the fine point of
perfection through the experience of countless generations, and applied
by each individual to the common want, just as hunger impels all mankind
to eat.
Such a condition of affairs, even in a community of human beings, would
imply a very high state of mental, if not of moral, development in the
individual. It would mean entire negation of self in the interest of the
common good. Even with all the forces of heredity at work, it would need
stern ascetic training for the young, and for the transgressing adult a
swift and merciless retribution, if the last dream of communism—the
abolition of all law and penalty, and the establishment of a natural
autonomy of well-doing—were ever to be realised in fact. And yet some
such state of things appears to exist in the bee-commonwealth: the
individual worker-bee seems to be the product of some such system carried
on through an indefinite space of time. Order is preserved, public works
go diligently forward, the clock of the national progress keeps time to
the second, not because there is a central wisdom-force to plan, to
govern, to awe recalcitrants, but because every worker-bee is herself the
State in miniature, all propensities alien to the pure collective spirit
having been long ago bred out of her by the sheer necessities of her
case.
The worker-bee, as we see her in the hive to-day, although evolution must
have been busy through the ages determining her present mind-power and
bodily conformation, is nevertheless as much a product of direct artifice
as she is of original nature. We have seen how the egg containing the
feminine germ, if given full scope and opportunity, develops into what
may be taken as the complete aboriginal type of female bee, differing
from the worker in a dozen essential ways. The queen also is probably,
in one respect at least—her amazing fecundity—a deliberate creation of
the hive-people, as her over-production is brought about by
over-stimulation to meet an artificial state of affairs. Left to
herself, under pristine conditions, she would certainly lay on a much
more moderate scale. But the worker-bee owes her unique structure and
mental constitution almost entirely to the intervention of her nurses
from the moment of the hatching of the egg. Careful experiment has
proved that the queen-larva and the worker-larva are identical up to the
third day of their life in the cell, except that the queen has made more
rapid growth owing to more generous and more ample fare. After the third
day, the genital system of each larva will begin to develop, if this rich
nitrogenous diet is maintained. In the case of the queen, this
pre-digested food, well called bee-milk, is lavished on the favoured grub
up to the last moment of its larval existence, no other food being given.
But in the case of the worker-grub, not only has its supply of bee-milk
been restricted in both quantity and quality from the day of its birth,
but now—just before the development of the ovaries might be expected—an
important change is made. The allowance of bee milk is greatly reduced,
while plain honey is given in addition, but on the same parsimonious
scale, to the end of its five days’ larval life.
What other influences, if any, are brought to bear on the young
worker-bee at this portentous stage of her career, it is impossible to
say. But at least the change in the food is well ascertained, and the
results—whether of this alone, or in combination with other treatment—are
more than astounding. Not only is the development of the sex-organs so
completely arrested that hardly a trace of them can be discovered in the
adult worker-bee, but, from that moment, the larva seems to become an
essentially different creature, reflecting more and more the attributes
of her nurses, and showing wider and wider departure from those of the
mother-bee. As soon as the worker changes into the pupa state, organs
appear of which the queen has not the faintest rudiments. She receives
her special equipment for field-work in a pair of baskets for carrying
pollen. Her tongue is lengthened, so that it may reach the nectar hidden
deep down in the clover-bells. She is to become a builder, and therefore
is provided with half a dozen crucibles wherein to prepare the wax. Her
useless ovipositor is changed into a weapon: it is straightened,
shortened; the barbs upon it are multiplied and strengthened; a gland,
with which it is furnished, and which, in the queen, contains an all but
harmless fluid, is now filled with an active poison. Above all, she
develops a brain-power far in excess of that of the normal female bee,
her mother; and she acquires a whole new set of impulses and aspirations
from beginning to end.
While the queen-bee’s natural element is the obscurity of the hive, and
she would seem both to hate and fear the sunshine, the worker is
essentially an outdoor creature, revelling in the light and air. While
the queen, though obedient to the destiny that has made her
over-fruitful, displays nevertheless not the slightest joy of motherhood
nor interest in her children, the worker, doomed to eternal spinsterhood,
yet constitutes herself the true mother and nurse and instructress of all
the young in the hive. And the price exacted for the authority and power
which she usurps, or was usurped for her by those remote ancestors of
hers who first invented the sexless honey-bee, must be paid in the
hardest coin—that of life itself. Instead of the years that nature
allotted to her kind in the beginning, she is to endure hardly as many
months. Destiny, and her own vaulting ambitions, have given her too
arduous a part to play. Her stunted, yet over-elaborated body and
over-developed brain, cannot long hold out against the wear and tear of
the life she is born to. At best a few months see her dead at her work,
or using the last pulsations of her worn-out, ragged wings to carry her
away to the traditional burial-place of the hive; or her end may be to
fall under the stroke of the State executioners. For the old-age problem
has long ago discovered its effective solution in the bee-republic.
Justice that is capable of being tempered with mercy carries its own mark
of imperfection indelibly upon it. When the principle of all for the
common good has been driven to its last resort in logic, mercy to the
individual can only be another name for robbing Peter to pay Paul. In
bee-communism the sole title to life is utility, and so the old worn-out,
useless workers must go.
The development of the worker-egg through its various stages of growth,
until the perfectly formed insect emerges from the cell, makes a curious
study. The egg itself is remarkable, for it is covered with an hexagonal
pattern. The large compound eyes of the fully grown bee also show this
form. Each eye consists of about four thousand separate lenses, and each
lens is a regular hexagon. Wonder has often been expressed at the
ingenuity of the comb-builders in making the cells six-sided, and thus
crowding into a given space more compartments than could be secured by
the same amount of material wrought into any other shape. The ancient
writers explained this choice of the hexagonal cell by the supposed fact
that the six legs of the bee were simultaneously employed in
comb-building, each leg constructing its own portion of the cell. A more
modern idea is that the particular shape of the cell is accidental, or
rather the outcome of compelling circumstance, mutual pressure causing
the cells to assume the hexagonal form.
Now, it is quite true that soaked peas in a bottle will take this shape
in swelling, but the analogy will not hold good in respect of
comb-building. In the work of the bees there is no pressure or
constriction of any kind. Each cell is made separately, being joined on
to those above it; and the comb expands steadily downward and sideways
through an empty space until the desired limit is reached. A much more
probable explanation of the hexagonal form of the cell is that it was
arrived at by experience. The first combs may have been built with round
cells, the interstices being filled in with wax. But the bee, who is an
expert in the science of economy, would quickly see the disadvantage of
this plan. And with the hexagonal principle, an old familiar thing in
the hive—witness the pattern on the egg-surfaces, and the compound
eye-construction—it would not be long before she hit upon the better,
more scientific way.
There is, however, another reason, and almost as potent a one, for the
adoption of the six-sided cell both for brood-raising and the storing of
honey. It must be remembered that the present system of vertical walls
parallel and close together, made up of numberless small horizontal
chambers placed back to back, is not an ideal arrangement either for the
raising of the young or the storing of food. Yet it is the best possible
contrivance under the circumstances, which are forced upon the bee by the
necessity of leading a close, crowded, communal life. Air is a prime
need for all operations in the hive, but for none more than the
development of the young bees. When a queen is to be raised, a full
supply of fresh air is given her, but only at the expense of valuable
space. With the common kind, of which perhaps ten or fifteen thousand
may be maturing in the brood-nest at one and the same time, it is
obviously impossible to make any such concession. The young worker- or
drone-larva must secure what air it can through the narrow cell-top.
Now, the bee breathes at all stages of its career not through the mouth,
but by means of air-holes or spiracles in the sides of its body. If the
cell were round, the larva, when fairly grown, would fill the space, and
the air would reach the spiracles only with difficulty. But, no matter
what the size of the young grub may be, the angles of the hexagon cell
are never quite filled. They form half a dozen by-passes for the air,
arranged on all sides, and extending right to the base of the cell; and
thus the larva has the full benefit of the available air-supply, even
though it be necessarily scanty.
With the store-combs the six angles of the cell fulfil an equally
important office. The ideal honey-cell would be one with its mouth
opening upwards, so that it could be filled in an ordinary rational way.
But under the strict economical principles ruling in the hive such an
arrangement would be impracticable. The honey-vats must be stacked one
over the other in a horizontal position, and therefore must be chargeable
from the end. All cells in the comb have a slight upward tilt, but not
enough to retain the fluid contents if the cell were a round one. The
effect of the angles in the hexagon is to increase the retentive property
of the cell, and experience has taught the bees how to supplement this
natural holding power of the angles by just that slight cant of the cell
which is necessary to prevent the nectar running out.
The worker-bee, during her period of larval life, at first lies coiled up
at the bottom of the cell, but as her size increases she takes up a
position lengthways, with her head towards the cell-mouth. This,
however, is not a constant attitude, for she seems at intervals to make a
series of slow gyrations or somersaults, probably to facilitate the
casting of her skin, which she accomplishes several times during her five
days’ life as a grub. At the end of this time the nurse-bees stop the
feeding process and seal up the cell. Now the larva sets to work, first
to spin herself a silken shroud before entering on her long sleep as a
chrysalis, and then to change her skin for the last time. In the case of
the worker these fine-wrought sleeping-clothes envelop her whole body,
forming a continuous cocoon. But the queen-larva weaves herself only a
scanty sort of cloak, covering her head and thorax, but leaving her
nether portions bare. The theory usually advanced in explanation of this
is, that when the surplus queens are slaughtered in their cells by the
accepted mother-bee after her fertilisation, the fell work is rendered
easier by the absence of the tough material of the cocoon over the parts
generally attacked. It seems to be well substantiated that in a battle
of queens the stings are not used haphazard, as with the workers, but
each queen tries to thrust her weapon into one of her enemy’s spiracles
or breathing-holes, of which she possesses fourteen, seven on each side.
And a stroke dealt in this way appears to be always fatal.
But, in all likelihood, the true reason why the queen sleeps in a short
gown made of tough, coarse fibre must be looked for somewhere back in the
old ancestral history of the honey-bee. It is probably safe to consider
the complete worker cocoon as a comparatively recent introduction,
evolved to meet some necessity arising since the bee-people became a
civilised race. But what its true origin was appears to be out of the
reach of all conjecture. A curious fact is that these cocoons are never
removed from the cell. They remain fixed to its sides throughout, and
though the cell is otherwise carefully cleaned after the young bee has
vacated it, the cocoon is never interfered with, but continues as a
permanent lining to the cell. The same thing occurs with all successive
generations, each bee leaving her swaddling-clothes behind her, until so
great an accumulation occurs that the cell becomes too small for breeding
any but a puny, undersized race. With wild bees, where the nest has been
constructed in a tree-hollow, and there is usually plenty of surplus
room, the old brood-combs may be eventually abandoned and fresh ones
built farther on. Thus the stock generally shifts its station from year
to year. These natural bee-nests, or bee-bikes, as country people call
them, often reach a great age. Sometimes a swarm will get under the
rafters in a house-roof, and may be left undisturbed for generations. In
one case bees were traditionally supposed to have inhabited a blind loft
in a farmhouse continuously for forty or fifty years. A legend rife in
the village credited them with having stored many tons of honey, but when
the stock was sulphured little more than a vast accumulation of comb was
discovered. This comb was of all ages, from a few weeks old to an
unconjecturable number of years. Much of it was perfectly black, and the
cells choked up with pupa cocoons.
The fact that egg-laying is continued in these combs where others are not
available, even though the capacity of the cells has been greatly
reduced, seems to cast an added doubt on the theory that the size of the
cell is responsible for the fertilisation or non-fertilisation of the egg
as it is deposited by the queen. Very old drone-comb is sometimes found
in use for breeding purposes where the cells have become no larger than
those used for normal worker-brood. And yet the queen continues to lay
in them unimpregnated eggs. The whole question is still hedged round
with difficulties.
The young worker-bee, at the end of about three weeks from its first
inception, breaks from its chrysalis-skin, and begins to gnaw its way
through the cell-cover. The pollen, which is combined with the wax to
form this capping, discharges a double office. It makes the wax porous
for the admittance of air, and it renders the cell-cover edible, thus
causing the young bee to effect its own release through the promptings of
its appetite. The new-born worker, although fully grown, is a weak,
greyish-hued, flaccid creature for some time after it leaves its cradle.
Its earliest impulse seems to be to groom itself, and then to wander
about on a tour of inspection of its as yet narrow world of gloom and
noise and bustle. For the first day or two it does little else than
crawl about unnoticed in the busy throng, gradually gaining strength and
rigidity of limb.
[Picture: Brood-comb, showing eggs, larvæ in different stages of growth,
sealed cells, and young bees cutting their way out]
On the second day it may be seen dipping into the open honey-vats and
pollen-bins, of which a few are always scattered here and there among the
brood-cells. After this it seems to waken in earnest to its duties and
responsibilities, and takes its place among the nurse-bees, setting to
work with the rest in the stupendous task of feeding the larvæ.
In the ordinary course, the young worker-bee will not leave the hive for
about a fortnight after its emergence from the cell. In the interval,
however, it has a whole policy of life to study, and several trades to
learn. All the indoor work of the hive appears to be done by the young
bees during these first weeks of their existence. On them the whole care
and sustenance of the young brood depend. They produce the wax, and
build the combs; they look after the order and cleanliness of the hive;
they are the brewers of the honey, and the keepers of the stores; they
feed the queen-bee on her ceaseless rounds, and also give the drones
their daily rations of bee-milk, for it is certain that the male bees
depend very largely on the workers in this way, drawing only a part of
their diet from the common stores. The old bees are the foragers; but it
is probable they are met by the younger ones soon after their return to
the hive, and their burden of nectar, being regurgitated, is transferred
to the pouches of the young bees, by whom it is carried to the
store-combs in the upper regions of the hive. At least, if the
storage-chamber of a hive be opened during the busy part of the day,
hardly any old bees will be seen among the crowd, which is industriously
filling the cells with the new-gathered sweets.
It is not until the beginning of the second week of their life that the
young bees make their first essay in the open air, and then it is only
for a few minutes during the hottest part of the day. This sudden midday
uproar is a familiar experience to the bee-keeper during the late spring
and summer; and although the drones at first contribute largely to the
chorus, they soon fly away, while the singing cloud of bees which remains
enveloping every hive at this time, is entirely composed of the young
house-bees taking their daily brief allowance of exercise and air.
It is found that the glands necessary for the production of the
brood-food, as also the wax-generating organs, are largely developed in
bees only a few weeks old, while, after their first month of life is
over, these organs are greatly reduced. The bee generally begins outdoor
work as a forager soon after she has reached the age of fourteen days.
It is, however, probably a week or two longer before she attempts the
more serious business of nectar-gathering. Nearly all the pollen-bearers
are bees in their first young strength and vigour, and therefore
peculiarly adapted to the carrying of heavy burdens. But as soon as the
worker-bee has settled down to the great paramount task of honey-getting,
she seems to leave the pollen alone. Thus, in a normal colony, the life
of the honey-bee, short as it is, is carefully planned out from beginning
to end, each period having its special task for which the age of the bee
is peculiarly fitted. Yet this rule is no more absolute than any other
of the ways of the hive. Where the community is short-handed, and there
are not enough mature workers to gather stores, the young bees will be
turned out to forage at a much earlier date in their career. In the same
way, if a hive has been without a queen for some time, and therefore few
young bees are available to care for the brood when the new mother-bee
has at last established herself, many of the old workers will stay at
home and busy themselves with the nursery-work, which in the ordinary
course they would have long since relinquished.
There are many such instances of ingenious makeshift, or special
adaptation, in the ways of the honey-bee. She is a creature full of
resource on emergencies, but it is in the provision of desperate remedies
for really desperate ills that she shines at her brightest. The prime
disaster in bee-life is the loss of a queen at a time when it is
impossible to appoint a successor. The standard of intelligence, as well
as that of character, varies among bees almost as much as it does among
men. Some colonies will work harder and for longer hours than the rest.
Others will ease off when they have put by what they consider a
sufficiency of stores, and an idle spirit spreads visibly among them. In
a few cases there is a distinct moral twist in the national character,
and the bees take to robbing their neighbours’ larders instead of working
to furnish their own.
Permanent queenlessness is a calamity which affects different colonies in
different ways. With some it means complete despair, a cessation of all
enterprise or interest in life. Work is stopped; the guards are
withdrawn from the gate; the community seems to give up in a body, and to
await extinction with no more hope than a batch of criminals in the
condemned cell. But with others the common disaster is but a signal for
a universal quickening of wits, a furbishing-up of all possible and
impossible resources. To bees of this temper we should look for such
episodes as the egg-purloining to supply a queen-cell, which has been
already dealt with. But for supreme ingenuity, even though it be the
forlornest of forlorn hopes, perhaps there is nothing to equal a device
sometimes resorted to in this last emergency.
Looking through a hive which is not only without a queen, but which is
without any means of raising one, certain mysterious eggs are
unexpectedly discovered. These eggs are obviously quite newly laid, but
not in the orthodox way. A normal queen works consistently from cell to
cell, over a fairly regular patch of comb, and deposits only one egg in
each cell; but these eggs in the queenless hive have been laid in a
curiously haphazard way. The eggs are straggled over the comb. Two or
three cells have been furnished at one spot and a few more at another,
without the slightest attempt at the usual order and system. Moreover,
some cells contain single eggs, but others two, or even three, apiece.
It looks as if some demented mother-bee from another hive had caught her
keepers napping, and had made surreptitious excursion into the queenless
stock. But the most careful search through the hive will reveal no
queen, nor is one to be found. The explanation of the vagary is that one
of the workers has, in some extraordinary way, succeeded in rousing her
atrophied nature, and has become capable of laying eggs. Yet the doom of
the colony is not delayed by this, but rather hastened; for these eggs
will produce only drones, and thus still more useless mouths to feed. In
one well-authenticated case, the bees of a queenless colony built a
queen-cell, and actually transplanted to it one of these eggs laid by a
fertile worker, a dead drone being afterwards found in the cell.
How the laying worker is produced under the spur of the national crisis
can only be a matter for speculation, but probably the youngest bee of
the colony is plied with the special food usually given to queens, and
thus her generative faculties are, to a certain extent, developed.