It was Maeterlinck who introduced me to the bee. I mean, in the
psychical and in the poetical way. I had had a business introduction
earlier. It was when I was a boy. It is strange that I should remember
a formality like that so long; it must be nearly sixty years.
Bee scientists always speak of the bee as she. It is because all the
important bees are of that sex. In the hive there is one married bee,
called the queen; she has fifty thousand children; of these, about one
hundred are sons; the rest are daughters. Some of the daughters are
young maids, some are old maids, and all are virgins and remain so.
Every spring the queen comes out of the hive and flies away with one of
her sons and marries him. The honeymoon lasts only an hour or two; then
the queen divorces her husband and returns home competent to lay two
million eggs. This will be enough to last the year, but not more than
enough, because hundreds of bees get drowned every day, and other
hundreds are eaten by birds, and it is the queen’s business to keep the
population up to standard—say, fifty thousand. She must always have
that many children on hand and efficient during the busy season, which
is summer, or winter would catch the community short of food. She lays
from two thousand to three thousand eggs a day, according to the
demand; and she must exercise judgment, and not lay more than are
needed in a slim flower-harvest, nor fewer than are required in a
prodigal one, or the board of directors will dethrone her and elect a
queen that has more sense.
There are always a few royal heirs in stock and ready to take her
place—ready and more than anxious to do it, although she is their own
mother. These girls are kept by themselves, and are regally fed and
tended from birth. No other bees get such fine food as they get, or
live such a high and luxurious life. By consequence they are larger and
longer and sleeker than their working sisters. And they have a curved
sting, shaped like a scimitar, while the others have a straight one.
A common bee will sting any one or anybody, but a royalty stings
royalties only. A common bee will sting and kill another common bee,
for cause, but when it is necessary to kill the queen other ways are
employed. When a queen has grown old and slack and does not lay eggs
enough one of her royal daughters is allowed to come to attack her, the
rest of the bees looking on at the duel and seeing fair play. It is a
duel with the curved stings. If one of the fighters gets hard pressed
and gives it up and runs, she is brought back and must try again—once,
maybe twice; then, if she runs yet once more for her life, judicial
death is her portion; her children pack themselves into a ball around
her person and hold her in that compact grip two or three days, until
she starves to death or is suffocated. Meantime the victor bee is
receiving royal honors and performing the one royal function—laying
eggs.
As regards the ethics of the judicial assassination of the queen, that
is a matter of politics, and will be discussed later, in its proper
place.
During substantially the whole of her short life of five or six years
the queen lives in the Egyptian darkness and stately seclusion of the
royal apartments, with none about her but plebeian servants, who give
her empty lip-affection in place of the love which her heart hungers
for; who spy upon her in the interest of her waiting heirs, and report
and exaggerate her defects and deficiencies to them; who fawn upon her
and flatter her to her face and slander her behind her back; who grovel
before her in the day of her power and forsake her in her age and
weakness. There she sits, friendless, upon her throne through the long
night of her life, cut off from the consoling sympathies and sweet
companionship and loving endearments which she craves, by the gilded
barriers of her awful rank; a forlorn exile in her own house and home,
weary object of formal ceremonies and machine-made worship, winged
child of the sun, native to the free air and the blue skies and the
flowery fields, doomed by the splendid accident of her birth to trade
this priceless heritage for a black captivity, a tinsel grandeur, and a
loveless life, with shame and insult at the end and a cruel death—and
condemned by the human instinct in her to hold the bargain valuable!
Huber, Lubbock, Maeterlinck—in fact, all the great authorities—are
agreed in denying that the bee is a member of the human family. I do
not know why they have done this, but I think it is from dishonest
motives. Why, the innumerable facts brought to light by their own
painstaking and exhaustive experiments prove that if there is a master
fool in the world, it is the bee. That seems to settle it.
But that is the way of the scientist. He will spend thirty years in
building up a mountain range of facts with the intent to prove a
certain theory; then he is so happy in his achievement that as a rule
he overlooks the main chief fact of all—that his accumulation proves an
entirely different thing. When you point out this miscarriage to him he
does not answer your letters; when you call to convince him, the
servant prevaricates and you do not get in. Scientists have odious
manners, except when you prop up their theory; then you can borrow
money of them.
To be strictly fair, I will concede that now and then one of them will
answer your letter, but when they do they avoid the issue—you cannot
pin them down. When I discovered that the bee was human I wrote about
it to all those scientists whom I have just mentioned. For evasions, I
have seen nothing to equal the answers I got.
After the queen, the personage next in importance in the hive is the
virgin. The virgins are fifty thousand or one hundred thousand in
number, and they are the workers, the laborers. No work is done, in the
hive or out of it, save by them. The males do not work, the queen does
no work, unless laying eggs is work, but it does not seem so to me.
There are only two million of them, anyway, and all of five months to
finish the contract in. The distribution of work in a hive is as
cleverly and elaborately specialized as it is in a vast American
machine-shop or factory. A bee that has been trained to one of the many
and various industries of the concern doesn’t know how to exercise any
other, and would be offended if asked to take a hand in anything
outside of her profession. She is as human as a cook; and if you should
ask the cook to wait on the table, you know what would happen. Cooks
will play the piano if you like, but they draw the line there. In my
time I have asked a cook to chop wood, and I know about these things.
Even the hired girl has her frontiers; true, they are vague, they are
ill-defined, even flexible, but they are there. This is not conjecture;
it is founded on the absolute. And then the butler. You ask the butler
to wash the dog. It is just as I say; there is much to be learned in
these ways, without going to books. Books are very well, but books do
not cover the whole domain of esthetic human culture. Pride of
profession is one of the boniest bones in existence, if not the
boniest. Without doubt it is so in the hive.