THE DRONE AND HIS STORY
IT is true that all bee-keepers are enthusiasts, and true that long years
spent in the companionship of the hives invariably create a fearless
fellowship, a prime understanding between the bee-master and his legions.
But it is equally true that the longer you study the nature of the
honey-bee, the less enamoured you become of certain of her ways.
In the minds of old beemen there grows up, as the years glide, a sort of
awe of her. She is so manifestly a power, supreme in her little world.
She is so courageous, resourceful, brainy. All the weaknesses and
compromises, and most of the pleasures, have long ago been driven out of
her life, seemingly by her own act and will; yet, in doing this, she has
but refined the science of citizenship to its pure elements. Her entire
unselfishness, her readiness to sacrifice her individual good for the
good of the State, are as unquestionable as they are changeless. The
hive-polity, taken as a whole, is so admirable, and compares so
advantageously with certain human efforts in the same way, that you are
apt to exalt all her qualities into virtues; and to conclude that a
far-seeing, wise benevolence must have gone to the making of the perfect
Bee-State, instead of the cold, undeviating logic that alone has
fashioned it.
This remorseless smelting-down of life into the set moulds of principle,
without mercy and without reproach, has a cumulative effect on the mind
of the observer; and sooner or later, though he will early lose his fear
of her sting, he will develop a very real, but vague, awe of the
honey-bee in another way.
Just as Moses Rusden, the King’s bee-master, held up the life of the hive
as Nature’s evidence of the Divine will in earthly monarchy, so the
latter-day student is often constrained to ask himself whether the
bee-commonwealth does not point an authoritative moral in another way.
Here is a State—only a mimic one, but still not a negligible
example—where several of the most fiercely-debated questions of modern
human life are seen in long adopted and perfected working-order, and seen
in their fullness of result. Any attempt at a serious comparison between
men and women, and the drone and worker-bee, would justly lay the writer
open to the charge of grotesque trifling; but there is more than a
fanciful analogy between the principles on which all civilisations must
be based, whether they are insect or human. It cannot be denied that the
communal life of the honey-bee is a high civilisation; that it has grown
to be what it is to-day through ages of necessity; that the one sex has
the other under a complete and terrible subjection, for which, and for
the privilege of all power, the dominant sex has paid a terrible price.
The worker-bee to-day is an over-intellectual, neurotic, morbidly dutiful
creature, while the drone is admittedly nothing but a stupid, happy,
sensual lout. If the extreme difference between the sexes in bee-life
had been aboriginal, the relations of drone and worker, as we see them in
the hives to-day, would be meet and reasonable enough; but there seems to
be clear evidence that, far back in the life of the race, the female bee
was not so hopelessly superior to her mate. The queen-bee, in all
likelihood, fairly represents the mother-bee as she was before the
cooling crust of the earth made some sort of protected habitation
necessary, which led first to close clustering for mutual warmth, and
then gradually developed the complicated hive-life of to-day. But
evolution will hardly account for all that we see: revolution must have
had its part in the production of the modern self-unsexed worker. It has
been seen that there is no physiological reason why each worker in the
hive should not have grown into the fertile mother of thousands. The
workers are not a stunted, specialised race, slowly evolved by time and
necessity, and procreating their own stunted kind; but each worker is
deliberately manufactured to a set pattern by the authorities in the
hive, obedient to the call of the State. And when did the female bees
begin this tampering with the springs of life, this improving upon
Creation, which was the first vital step, failing which the present
bee-commonwealth had been impossible? It looks very like a superb act of
generalship in the great primæval war of sex—a brilliant piece of
strategy that gave victory at a blow, and rendered the after-steps in the
scheme of conquest a matter of logical sequence.
The whole question of the artificial production of the worker-bee is
surrounded with difficulties; and it seems possible, on our present level
of knowledge, to do little more than state the facts, and there leave
them. The supremacy of the females in hive-life appears to have dated
from the time that the vast majority deprived themselves, or were
deprived by their immediate ancestors, of their share in procreation, and
the ovipositor discovered itself as a weapon of offence and defence.
Before the worker-bees existed as an armed force, there is no reason to
suppose that the female bee had a great physical advantage over the
drone. The queen-bee’s propensity to thrust her ovipositor into the
spiracles of her rival, and so effectually to despatch her, as well as
her inveterate hatred of her kind, may both be late developments, due to
the isolated, artificial life she now leads. While the worker is ever
ready with her sting, the queen uses it so rarely that many old
experienced bee-keepers of the present time deny her altogether the power
of stinging. A much more natural tendency with her is to bite; and when
it comes to the use of the sharp, strong, sidelong jaws, the drone has a
more redoubtable equipment than any, although he has apparently lost the
will and sense to use it.
Whatever the drone may have been in far-off ages, the worker-bees have
him now well under the iron heel of matriarchal expediency; and they see
to it that he shall be fit only for the one indispensable office,
although in that regard they exhaust every ingenuity to make him all that
his kind should be. It is plain they would do without him altogether if
that were possible. As it is, for nine months in the year there are no
drones at all, and then only a few hundreds are raised in each hive—the
bare minimum that will ensure the successful mating of the young queens
when the summer sunshine calls them to their wooing. It might be
supposed that where there are comparatively so few queens to be
fertilised—only two or three at most from each hive, and these only once
in a lifetime—that even those drones which are now tolerated are in
excess of the number required. But a cardinal principle in bee-life is
that the young queens shall choose their mates from another tribe, and so
ensure a continual influx of new blood to the colony. This can only be
effected out-of-doors, and as far as possible from the parent hive. The
strongest impulse, therefore, of the virgin-queen, when she goes off on
her mating-flight, is to get away quickly from her home surroundings.
She flies straight off at tremendous speed, and thus has every chance of
getting unperceived into new country, and so into the reconnoitring
ground of strange drones.
Another reason for her extended flight and its remarkable pace is that
only the strongest and swiftest drone of all the pursuing multitude is
likely to overtake her, and this again makes for the betterment of the
race. Perhaps there is no parallel instance in nature where the
selection of the fittest individuals to continue a species is so
carefully provided for, and no doubt this accounts for the high place of
the honey-bee in the scale of created things. But this scheme involves
enormous risk to the young queen. A hundred dangers lurk on her path.
She is a tempting morsel for every bird that throngs the air of the June
morning. Her untried wings may fail her. Even if she gets back safely
to the bee-garden, she may enter the wrong hive, to her instant
destruction. But she must take her chance of all risks; and the only
thing to do is to render her absence from home as brief as may be, and
her fertilisation as sure, by making the wandering drone-population large
enough to cover all probable ranges of flight.
From the very first the drone is nurtured in a different way from the
worker-bee. The egg is laid in a wider and deeper cell; and during its
first three days of life the drone-larva is fed with bee-milk, probably
of a special kind and certainly of more generous quantity. After the
third day this chyle-food is reduced, as is the case with the
worker-grub; but while the worker is then given only honey, it is certain
that the drone-larva receives both honey and pollen, and that for a full
day longer. In all, it takes about twenty-four or twenty-five days to
produce the perfect drone-bee, as against an average twenty-one days for
the worker. The queen-bee, as has been already seen, is developed in
much less time than either, little more than a fortnight elapsing between
the time the egg is laid and the time she is ready to gnaw her way out of
the cell.
After the drone is hatched, it will be another two weeks or so before he
makes his first venture in the open air. All this time he has the free
run of the larder, and steadily gorges himself on honey when he is not
sleeping off the effects of his surfeit in some snug, out-of-the-way
corner of the hive. But honey is not his only, or even his principal,
food. Throughout his whole life he is constantly fed by the house-bees
with the rich chyle-food given to him as a larva, and it has been proved
that if this is withheld from him for the space of three days he will die
of starvation, even in the midst of abundant honey. Thus the worker-bees
have him completely in their power.
The first flight of the drones is a stirring event in the bee-garden.
The common sound of the hives goes on practically the whole year through.
Every sunny midday, when the temperature mounts to 45° or 50°, will see
each hive the centre of a little galaxy of singers: it is only the volume
of the music that varies with the waxing or waning days. But with the
coming of the drones the whole symphony of the bee-garden abruptly
changes. They never move from their snug indoor quarters until the day
is wearing on towards noon, and then only in the brightest weather.
Blundering aggressively through the crowd of busy foragers, they rise
heavily on the wing, and soon the ordinary note of the garden is drowned
in the new uproar. They seem to come almost simultaneously from all
hives at once. For a minute or two the rich, hoarse melody holds the
air; and then, almost as suddenly, it dies away, as these roystering
ne’er-do-wells troop off over hill and dale, each to his favourite
hunting-ground.
There is great divergence of opinion as to the limits of flight of the
drone, but probably he goes farther and faster than any have yet
credited. His magnificent stretch and strength of wing mark him for a
flier. He is all brute force and lusty energy; and it would be strange
if, with but one thing to do in life—to gad about in search of amorous
adventure—he could not do it to a purpose. If a hive of bees be removed
to a distance in the height of the season, some of both workers and
drones are sure to find their way back to the old spot. This has
constantly taken place when hives have been carried no farther than two
miles. But in one case, when the distance was more than twice as much,
no workers were seen round the old hive-station, yet a little company of
drones was winging aimlessly about the tenantless stool, and there can be
little doubt that these belonged to the removed colony. It is not
suggested that they deliberately travelled all these miles. The chances
are that, in their daily flight, they got so far away from the new
station that they came within the zone of old landmarks, and thus
naturally went on by the long-accustomed ways.
As a typical instance of a sluggard and idler, the drone-bee has enjoyed
a vogue in the preparatory-school books for ages past. But, whatever his
primæval equipment for usefulness may have been, it is evident now that
he could not labour if he would. Physically, in all points but that of
muscle, as well as mentally, he has become degraded to the inferior of
the worker-bee in every way. He is destitute of all those special
contrivances with which she is so amply furnished. He has no baskets for
pollen-carrying, nor any of the ingenious brushes and combs which she
uses to scrape the pollen from herself and others. He has neither
wax-generating organs, nor leg-pincers to deal with wax. His tongue is
too short for honey-getting. His brain is much smaller than even that of
the feeble-minded queen. The intricate gland-systems, which play so
important a role in the daily life of the worker, are either completely
atrophied in the drone or exist only in an elementary state. While it
has been the communal will of the hive that the worker-bee should develop
an amazing proficiency of mind and body, the same forces have been
steadily at work to degrade the male-bee into a creature of dependence,
gradually training out of him all initiative and idea, except in the one
direction. Just as in the case of the queen and the worker, drone and
worker-bee seem hardly to belong to the same race.
And yet, for all his frank incapabilities and lack of ideals, the drone
offers, in one respect, a refreshing contrast to his sour, stern,
duty-worshipping sister. He is a life-long, incorrigible optimist. He
fiddles gaily while the city burns. All his misery and mourning would
not serve to quench a single spark of it; so he eats, drinks, and is
merry, with the intuition of all drones that Nemesis waits on the morrow
with something disagreeable. It is impossible to study his ways for long
without recognising the spirit of rude jollity and horse-play that
thoroughly pervades all he does. In and out of the hive he blusters,
cannoning roughly against all he meets, and raising his burly, bullying
song in the air as a sort of protest against all this anxious industry
going on about him. Once gone from the neighbourhood of the hive, he
seems to keep incessantly on the wing until hunger prompts him home
again. For no one has ever seen a drone-bee among the insects that haunt
the flowers, nor ever seen him basking on a sunlit wall or tree-trunk,
after the kind of almost every other winged atom in the universe.
He comes back to the hive with the same noisy, careless fanfaronade, and
is received by the workers with the same sullen indifference. They give
him his fill of bee-milk, linking tongues with him as he sits up like an
overgrown baby, voracious, clamouring to be fed. They suffer him to
swill at the honey-stores unchecked, but plainly regard him with
contumely. He is a terrible expense to the State, yet a necessary one.
Silently they go about their uncongenial business of nourishing
him—silently, and with an ominous patience. They grudge him every drop,
and, all the more, urge him to his excesses. It is not for long. The
day of reckoning is near at hand. Already the poppies glow scarlet on
the hill—the poppies that mark the turning-point of the summer; and after
them the long decline, with its ever-diminishing sun-glow; each day with
a scantier meed of blossom, until the path runs again into the dreary
levels, the sober greys and russets, of winter death.
Now the worker-bee is to show a grizzly seam in her nature, matching ill
with the fine hues and qualities of mind for which she is so justly
famed. And that she is not all lovable, all admirable, accounts for the
exceeding love of her that moves the hearts of men who know her through
and through. The story of the massacre of the drones has hardly a
parallel for sheer relentless ferocity—unrecking abandonment to a
vengeance long withheld for expediency’s sake. There come the first
chill nights of mid-July, and the honey-flow is suddenly at an end. The
clover and sainfoin have already fallen to the sickle. Nothing but the
bravest warmth and exuberance of the summer could now withstand the drain
of the myriad honey-makers, and a few hours’ cold dams up at once the
attenuated stream. The time of prosperity is over. There will be no
more abundance of honey. It remains for the genius of hive-economy to
prove how much of what has been gathered can be preserved for future
needs.
The first sign of the _débâcle_ is the throwing out at the hive entrance
of certain pale, gruesome objects—the corpses of immature drones, not
dead from mischance, but ruthlessly torn from their cells. This may go
on intermittently for many days, and while the fell work is proceeding
the living drones seem to take no warning. They keep up their merry
round; the unending feast riots forward; daily the bee-garden is filled
with their careless, overweening song. And then at last the signal for
the slaughter is given. Within each hive a curious sobbing outcry
begins—a cry that is nothing but sheer terror put into sound. The drones
no longer lie in easy ranks between the combs, placidly sleeping off one
debauch and dreaming of another. They are all awake now, and fleeing
abjectly for their lives through the narrow ways of the bee-city, the
workers in hot pursuit.
The deep, vibrant, horror-laden note increases hour by hour. As each
executioner overtakes her victim, she grips him by the base of the wing;
and, helped by others all alike infuriate at the work, she half drags,
half pushes him through the throng, until she has him in the light of
day, and tumbles with him to the ground; he for ever fighting and
struggling, and uttering that frenzied note of fear; she savagely gnawing
at the wing until it is disabled, and he can never more return to the
hive. Many of the strongest drones escape from their persecutors for the
time being, and fly away unhurt. But it is only for a few hours. Hunger
is sure to bring them back to the hive, when the waiting guards fall upon
them, and maim or drive them off once more. It is specially to be marked
that the bees never sting the drones at this great annual feast of
carnage. There is that much method in the madness which has seized upon
them; for, in the rough-and-tumble of such a conflict, stings would be
plucked out by the roots, and thus valuable lives would go down with the
worthless. The sole object seems to be to rid the hives as effectively
as possible of the presence of the drones; and the disablement of one
wing appears to be all that is necessary, and therefore all for which the
deft assassin strives.
With some bee-races the massacre of the drones is carried through in an
incredibly short space of time; with others the agony of the thing is
drawn out for days together. The wretched sires of the hive are caught
between two evils, each as fatal as the other. If they fly off to the
fields, starvation and the night-chills will swiftly bring about their
end. If they return to the hive, a still speedier death awaits them.
Night and day, at this time, the guard-bees are doubled and re-doubled at
the city-gates; and there is little chance of the wiliest drone
outwitting them. But he usually takes the home-hazard; and sooner or
later comes blundering in, receiving with open arms, as it were, his
share of the knife, as Huddlestone faced the Carbonari.
All this is the common way with the bee-republic, when the season goes as
it should; and the hive is in possession of a mother-bee—young, strong,
and of proved fecundity. But there are times when the drones—for all
their great expense and drain on the wealth of the colony—are suffered to
live on until the late autumn, or even to remain unmolested throughout
the winter and following spring. If the bee-master sees drones about a
hive, when other colonies have long ago made a good riddance of them, he
well knows what ails the stock. Its queen is old and failing; and these
astute amazons have given reprieve to their male-kind until a new
mother-bee can be raised and properly mated. It is a case of mercy to
the drones tempered with so much justice to themselves that the original
virtue is largely discounted.
And where the drones are carried through the winter, it is ever a sign
that the hive is not only without a queen, but never will contrive one,
of their own race. Yet they know that, in the preservation of the
drones, they have at least one indispensable element for their salvation,
and—who shall gainsay it of the sovereign honey-bee?—perhaps they rely on
the bee-master to guess their plight, and furnish them with another
queen, in time to save his property from extinction.