Produced by Steve Solomon
THE LIFE OF THE BEE
By Maurice Maeterlinck
Translated By Alfred Sutro
NEW YORK
1914
_Published May, 1901_
Contents
I. ON THE THRESHOLD OF THE HIVE
II. THE SWARM
III. THE FOUNDATION OF THE CITY
IV. THE LIFE OF THE BEE
V. THE YOUNG QUEENS
VI. THE NUPTIAL FLIGHT
VII. THE MASSACRE OF THE MALES
VIII. THE PROGRESS OF THE RACE
APPENDIX
I -- ON THE THRESHOLD OF THE HIVE
{1}
IT is not my intention to write a treatise on apiculture, or on
practical bee-keeping. Excellent works of the kind abound in all
civilised countries, and it were useless to attempt another. France
has those of Dadant, Georges de Layens and Bonnier, Bertrand, Hamet,
Weber, Clement, the Abbe Collin, etc. English-speaking countries
have Langstroth, Bevan, Cook, Cheshire, Cowan, Root, etc. Germany
has Dzierzon, Van Berlespoch, Pollmann, Vogel, and many others.
Nor is this book to be a scientific monograph on Apis Mellifica,
Ligustica, Fasciata, Dorsata, etc., or a collection of new
observations and studies. I shall say scarcely anything that those
will not know who are somewhat familiar with bees. The notes and
experiments I have made during my twenty years of beekeeping I shall
reserve for a more technical work; for their interest is necessarily
of a special and limited nature, and I am anxious not to over-burden
this essay. I wish to speak of the bees very simply, as one speaks
of a subject one knows and loves to those who know it not. I do not
intend to adorn the truth, or merit the just reproach Reaumur
addressed to his predecessors in the study of our honey-flies, whom
he accused of substituting for the marvellous reality marvels that
were imaginary and merely plausible. The fact that the hive contains
so much that is wonderful does not warrant our seeking to add to its
wonders. Besides, I myself have now for a long time ceased to look
for anything more beautiful in this world, or more interesting, than
the truth; or at least than the effort one is able to make towards
the truth. I shall state nothing, therefore, that I have not
verified myself, or that is not so fully accepted in the text-books
as to render further verification superfluous. My facts shall be as
accurate as though they appeared in a practical manual or scientific
monograph, but I shall relate them in a somewhat livelier fashion
than such works would allow, shall group them more harmoniously
together, and blend them with freer and more mature reflections. The
reader of this book will not learn therefrom how to manage a hive;
but he will know more or less all that can with any certainty be
known of the curious, profound, and intimate side of its
inhabitants. Nor will this be at the cost of what still remains to
be learned. I shall pass over in silence the hoary traditions that,
in the country and many a book, still constitute the legend of the
hive. Whenever there be doubt, disagreement, hypothesis, when I
arrive at the unknown, I shall declare it loyally; you will find
that we often shall halt before the unknown. Beyond the appreciable
facts of their life we know but little of the bees. And the closer
our acquaintance becomes, the nearer is our ignorance brought to us
of the depths of their real existence; but such ignorance is better
than the other kind, which is unconscious, and satisfied.
Does an analogous work on the bee exist? I believe I have read
almost all that has been written on bees; but of kindred matter I
know only Michelet's chapter at the end of his book "The Insect,"
and Ludwig Buchner's essay in his "Mind in Animals." Michelet merely
hovers on the fringe of his subject; Buchner's treatise is
comprehensive enough, but contains so many hazardous statements, so
much long-discarded gossip and hearsay, that I suspect him of never
having left his library, never having set forth himself to question
his heroines, or opened one of the many hundreds of rustling,
wing-lit hives which we must profane before our instinct can be
attuned to their secret, before we can perceive the spirit and
atmosphere, perfume and mystery, of these virgin daughters of toil.
The book smells not of the bee, or its honey; and has the defects of
many a learned work, whose conclusions often are preconceived, and
whose scientific attainment is composed of a vast array of doubtful
anecdotes collected on every side. But in this essay of mine we
rarely shall meet each other; for our starting-point, our aim, and
our point of view are all very different.
{2}
The bibliography of the bee (we will begin with the books so as to
get rid of them as soon as we can and go to the source of the books)
is very extensive. From the beginning this strange little creature,
that lived in a society under complicated laws and executed
prodigious labours in the darkness, attracted the notice of men.
Aristotle, Cato, Varro, Pliny, Columella, Palladius all studied the
bees; to say nothing of Aristomachus, who, according to Cicero,
watched them for fifty-eight years, and of Phyliscus, whose writings
are lost. But these dealt rather with the legend of the bee; and all
that we can gather therefrom--which indeed is exceedingly little--we
may find condensed in the fourth book of Virgil's Georgics.
The real history of the bee begins in the seventeenth century, with
the discoveries of the great Dutch savant Swammerdam. It is well,
however, to add this detail, but little known: before Swammerdam a
Flemish naturalist named Clutius had arrived at certain important
truths, such as the sole maternity of the queen and her possession
of the attributes of both sexes, but he had left these unproved.
Swammerdam founded the true methods of scientific investigation; he
invented the microscope, contrived injections to ward off decay, was
the first to dissect the bees, and by the discovery of the ovaries
and the oviduct definitely fixed the sex of the queen, hitherto
looked upon as a king, and threw the whole political scheme of the
hive into most unexpected light by basing it upon maternity. Finally
he produced woodcuts and engravings so perfect that to this day they
serve to illustrate many books on apiculture. He lived in the
turbulent, restless Amsterdam of those days, regretting "Het Zoete
Buiten Leve "--The Sweet Life of the Country--and died, worn-out
with work, at the age of forty-three. He wrote in a pious, formal
style, with beautiful, simple outbursts of a faith that, fearful of
falling away, ascribed all things to the glory of the Creator; and
embodied his observations and studies in his great work "Bybel der
Natuure," which the doctor Boerhave, a century later, caused to be
translated from the Dutch into Latin under the title of "Biblia
Naturae." (Leyden, 1737.)
Then came Reaumur, who, pursuing similar methods, made a vast number
of curious experiments and researches in his gardens at Charenton,
and devoted to the bees an entire volume of his "Notes to Serve for
a History of Insects." One may read it with profit to-day, and
without fatigue. It is clear, direct, and sincere, and possessed of
a certain hard, arid charm of its own. He sought especially the
destruction of ancient errors; he himself was responsible for
several new ones; he partially understood the formation of swarms
and the political establishment of queens; in a word, he discovered
many difficult truths, and paved the way for the discovery of more.
He fully appreciated the marvellous architecture of the hive; and
what he said on the subject has never been better said. It is to
him, too, that we owe the idea of the glass hives, which, having
since been perfected, enable us to follow the entire private life of
these fierce insects, whose work, begun in the dazzling sunshine,
receives its crown in the darkness. To be comprehensive, one should
mention also the somewhat subsequent works and investigations of
Charles Bonnet and Schirach (who solved the enigma of the royal
egg); but I will keep to the broad lines, and pass at once to
Francois Huber, the master and classic of contemporary apiarian
science.
Huber was born in Geneva in 1750, and fell blind in his earliest
youth. The experiments of Reaumur interested him; he sought to
verify them, and soon becoming passionately absorbed in these
researches, eventually, with the assistance of an intelligent and
faithful servant, Francois Burnens, devoted his entire life to the
study of the bee. In the annals of human suffering and human triumph
there is nothing more touching, no lesson more admirable, than the
story of this patient collaboration, wherein the one who saw only
with immaterial light guided with his spirit the eyes and hands of
the other who had the real earthly vision; where he who, as we are
assured, had never with his own eyes beheld a comb of honey, was yet
able, notwithstanding the veil on his dead eyes that rendered double
the veil in which nature enwraps all things, to penetrate the
profound secrets of the genius that had made this invisible comb; as
though to teach us that no condition in life can warrant our
abandoning our desire and search for the truth. I will not enumerate
all that apiarian science owes to Huber; to state what it does not
owe were the briefer task. His "New Observations on Bees," of which
the first volume was written in 1789, in the form of letters to
Charles Bonnet, the second not appearing till twenty years later,
have remained the unfailing, abundant treasure into which every
subsequent writer has dipped. And though a few mistakes may be found
therein, a few incomplete truths; though since his time considerable
additions have been made to the micrography and practical culture of
bees, the handling of queens, etc., there is not a single one of his
principal statements that has been disproved, or discovered in
error; and in our actual experience they stand untouched, and indeed
at its very foundation.
{3}
Some years of silence followed these revelations; but soon a German
clergyman, Dzierzon, discovered parthenogenesis, _i. e._ the
virginal parturition of queens, and contrived the first hive with
movable combs, thereby enabling the bee-keeper henceforth to take
his share of the harvest of honey, without being forced to destroy
his best colonies and in one instant annihilate the work of an
entire year. This hive, still very imperfect, received masterly
improvement at the hands of Langstroth, who invented the movable
frame properly so called, which has been adopted in America with
extraordinary success. Root, Quinby, Dadant, Cheshire, De Layens,
Cowan, Heddon, Howard, etc., added still further and precious
improvement. Then it occurred to Mehring that if bees were supplied
with combs that had an artificial waxen foundation, they would be
spared the labour of fashioning the wax and constructing the cells,
which costs them much honey and the best part of their time; he
found that the bees accepted these combs most readily, and adapted
them to their requirements.
Major de Hruschka invented the Honey-Extractor, which enables the
honey to be withdrawn by centrifugal force without breaking the
combs, etc. And thus, in a few years, the methods of apiculture
underwent a radical change. The capacity and fruitfulness of the
hives were trebled. Great and productive apiaries arose on every
side. An end was put to the useless destruction of the most
industrious cities, and to the odious selection of the least fit
which was its result. Man truly became the master of the bees,
although furtively, and without their knowledge; directing all
things without giving an order, receiving obedience but not
recognition. For the destiny once imposed by the seasons he has
substituted his will. He repairs the injustice of the year, unites
hostile republics, and equalises wealth. He restricts or augments
the births, regulates the fecundity of the queen, dethrones her and
instals another in her place, after dexterously obtaining the
reluctant consent of a people who would be maddened at the mere
suspicion of an inconceivable intervention. When he thinks fit, he
will peacefully violate the secret of the sacred chambers, and the
elaborate, tortuous policy of the palace. He will five or six times
in succession deprive the bees of the fruit of their labour, without
harming them, without their becoming discouraged or even
impoverished. He proportions the store-houses and granaries of their
dwellings to the harvest of flowers that the spring is spreading
over the dip of the hills. He compels them to reduce the extravagant
number of lovers who await the birth of the royal princesses. In a
word he does with them what he will, he obtains what he will,
provided always that what he seeks be in accordance with their laws
and their virtues; for beyond all the desires of this strange god
who has taken possession of them, who is too vast to be seen and too
alien to be understood, their eyes see further than the eyes of the
god himself; and their one thought is the accomplishment, with
untiring sacrifice, of the mysterious duty of their race.
{4}
Let us now, having learned from books all that they had to teach us
of a very ancient history, leave the science others have acquired
and look at the bees with our own eyes. An hour spent in the midst
of the apiary will be less instructive, perhaps; but the things we
shall see will be infinitely more stimulating and more actual.
I have not yet forgotten the first apiary I saw, where I learned to
love the bees. It was many years ago, in a large village of Dutch
Flanders, the sweet and pleasant country whose love for brilliant
colour rivals that of Zealand even, the concave mirror of Holland; a
country that gladly spreads out before us, as so many pretty,
thoughtful toys, her illuminated gables, and waggons, and towers;
her cupboards and clocks that gleam at the end of the passage; her
little trees marshalled in line along quays and canal-banks,
waiting, one almost might think, for some quiet, beneficent
ceremony; her boats and her barges with sculptured poops, her
flower-like doors and windows, immaculate dams, and elaborate,
many-coloured drawbridges; and her little varnished houses, bright
as new pottery, from which bell-shaped dames come forth, all
a-glitter with silver and gold, to milk the cows in the white-hedged
fields, or spread the linen on flowery lawns, cut into patterns of
oval and lozenge, and most astoundingly green.
To this spot, where life would seem more restricted than
elsewhere--if it be possible for life indeed to become restricted--a
sort of aged philosopher had retired; an old man somewhat akin to
Virgil's--
"Man equal to kings, and approaching the gods;"
whereto Lafontaine might have added,--
"And, like the gods, content and at rest."
Here had he built his refuge, being a little weary; not disgusted,
for the large aversions are unknown to the sage; but a little weary
of interrogating men, whose answers to the only interesting
questions one can put concerning nature and her veritable laws are
far less simple than those that are given by animals and plants. His
happiness, like the Scythian philosopher's, lay all in the beauties
of his garden; and best-loved and visited most often, was the
apiary, composed of twelve domes of straw, some of which he had
painted a bright pink, and some a clear yellow, but most of all a
tender blue; having noticed, long before Sir John Lubbock's
demonstrations, the bees' fondness for this colour.
These hives stood against the wall of the house, in the angle formed
by one of those pleasant and graceful Dutch kitchens whose
earthenware dresser, all bright with copper and tin, reflected
itself through the open door on to the peaceful canal. And the
water, burdened with these familiar images beneath its curtain of
poplars, led one's eyes to a calm horizon of mills and of meadows.
Here, as in all places, the hives lent a new meaning to the flowers
and the silence, the balm of the air and the rays of the sun. One
seemed to have drawn very near to the festival spirit of nature. One
was content to rest at this radiant crossroad, where the aerial ways
converge and divide that the busy and tuneful bearers of all country
perfumes unceasingly travel from dawn unto dusk. One heard the
musical voice of the garden, whose loveliest hours revealed their
rejoicing soul and sang of their gladness. One came hither, to the
school of the bees, to be taught the preoccupations of all-powerful
nature, the harmonious concord of the three kingdoms, the
indefatigable organisation of life, and the lesson of ardent and
disinterested work; and another lesson too, with a moral as good,
that the heroic workers taught there, and emphasised, as it were,
with the fiery darts of their myriad wings, was to appreciate the
somewhat vague savour of leisure, to enjoy the almost unspeakable
delights of those immaculate days that revolved on themselves in the
fields of space, forming merely a transparent globe, as void of
memory as the happiness without alloy.
{5}
In order to follow, as simply as possible, the life of the bees
through the year, we will take a hive that awakes in the spring and
duly starts on its labours; and then we shall meet, in their natural
order, all the great episodes, viz.: the formation and departure of
the swarm, the foundation of the new city, the birth, combat and
nuptial flight of the young queens, the massacre of the males, and
finally, the return of the sleep of winter. With each of these
episodes there will go the necessary explanations as to the laws,
habits, peculiarities and events that produce and accompany it; so
that, when arrived at the end of the bee's short year, which extends
only from April to the last days of September, we shall have gazed
upon all the mysteries of the palace of honey. Before we open it,
therefore, and throw a general glance around, we only need say that
the hive is composed of a queen, the mother of all her people; of
thousands of workers or neuters who are incomplete and sterile
females; and lastly of some hundreds of males, from whom one shall
be chosen as the sole and unfortunate consort of the queen that the
workers will elect in the future, after the more or less voluntary
departure of the reigning mother.
{6}
The first time that we open a hive there comes over us an emotion
akin to that we might feel at profaning some unknown object, charged
perhaps with dreadful surprise, as a tomb. A legend of menace and
peril still clings to the bees. There is the distressful
recollection of her sting, which produces a pain so characteristic
that one knows not wherewith to compare it; a kind of destroying
dryness, a flame of the desert rushing over the wounded limb, as
though these daughters of the sun had distilled a dazzling poison
from their father's angry rays, in order more effectively to defend
the treasure they gather from his beneficent hours.
It is true that were some one who neither knows nor respects the
customs and character of the bee suddenly to fling open the hive, it
would turn at once into a burning bush of heroism and anger; but the
slight amount of skill needed to handle it with impunity can be most
readily acquired. Let but a little smoke be deftly applied, much
coolness and gentleness be shown, and our well-armed workers will
suffer themselves to be despoiled without dreaming of drawing their
sting. It is not the fact, as some have maintained, that the bees
recognise their master; nor have they any fear of man; but at the
smell of the smoke, at the large slow gestures that traverse their
dwellings without threatening them, they imagine that this is not
the attack of an enemy against whom defence is possible, but that it
is a force or a natural catastrophe whereto they do well to submit.
Instead of vainly struggling, therefore, they do what they can to
safeguard the future; and, obeying a foresight that for once is in
error, they fly to their reserves of honey, into which they eagerly
dip in order to possess within themselves the wherewithal to start a
new city, immediately and no matter where, should the ancient one be
destroyed or they be compelled to forsake it.
{7}
The first impression of the novice before whom an observation-hive*
is opened will be one of some disappointment. He had been told that
this little glass case contained an unparalleled activity, an
infinite number of wise laws, and a startling amalgam of mystery,
experience, genius, calculation, science, of various industries, of
certitude and prescience, of intelligent habits and curious feelings
and virtues. All that he sees is a confused mass of little reddish
groups, somewhat resembling roasted coffee-berries, or bunches of
raisins piled against the glass. They look more dead than alive;
their movements are slow, incoherent, and incomprehensible. Can
these be the wonderful drops of light he had seen but a moment ago,
unceasingly flashing and sparkling, as they darted among the pearls
and the gold of a thousand wide-open calyces?
By observation-hive is meant a hive of glass, furnished with black
curtains or shutters. The best kind have only one comb, thus
permitting both faces to be studied. These hives can be placed in a
drawing-room, library, etc., without inconvenience or danger. The
bees that inhabit the one I have in my study in Paris are able even
in the stony desert of that great city, to find the wherewithal to
nourish themselves and to prosper.
They appear to be shivering in the darkness, to be numbed,
suffocated, so closely are they huddled together; one might fancy
they were ailing captives, or queens dethroned, who have had their
one moment of glory in the midst of their radiant garden, and are
now compelled to return to the shameful squalor of their poor
overcrowded home.
It is with them as with all that is deeply real; they must be
studied, and one must learn how to study them. The inhabitant of
another planet who should see men and women coming and going almost
imperceptibly through our streets, crowding at certain times around
certain buildings, or waiting for one knows not what, without
apparent movement, in the depths of their dwellings, might conclude
therefrom that they, too, were miserable and inert. It takes time to
distinguish the manifold activity contained in this inertia.
And indeed every one of the little almost motionless groups in the
hive is incessantly working, each at a different trade. Repose is
unknown to any; and such, for instance, as seem the most torpid, as
they hang in dead clusters against the glass, are intrusted with the
most mysterious and fatiguing task of all: it is they who secrete
and form the wax. But the details of this universal activity will be
given in their place. For the moment we need only call attention to
the essential trait in the nature of the bee which accounts for the
extraordinary agglomeration of the various workers. The bee is above
all, and even to a greater extent than the ant, a creature of the
crowd. She can live only in the midst of a multitude. When she
leaves the hive, which is so densely packed that she has to force
her way with blows of her head through the living walls that enclose
her, she departs from her proper element. She will dive for an
instant into flower-filled space, as the swimmer will dive into the
sea that is filled with pearls, but under pain of death it behoves
her at regular intervals to return and breathe the crowd as the
swimmer must return and breathe the air. Isolate her, and however
abundant the food or favourable the temperature, she will expire in
a few days not of hunger or cold, but of loneliness. From the crowd,
from the city, she derives an invisible aliment that is as necessary
to her as honey. This craving will help to explain the spirit of the
laws of the hive. For in them the individual is nothing, her
existence conditional only, and herself, for one indifferent moment,
a winged organ of the race. Her whole life is an entire sacrifice to
the manifold, everlasting being whereof she forms part. It is
strange to note that it was not always so. We find even to-day,
among the melliferous hymenoptera, all the stages of progressive
civilisation of our own domestic bee. At the bottom of the scale we
find her working alone, in wretchedness, often not seeing her
offspring (the Prosopis, the Colletes, etc.); sometimes living in
the midst of the limited family that she produces annually (as in
the case of the humble-bee). Then she forms temporary associations (the
Panurgi, the Dasypodoe, the Hacliti, etc.) and at last we arrive,
through successive stages, at the almost perfect but pitiless society of
our hives, where the individual is entirely merged in the republic, and
the republic in its turn invariably sacrificed to the abstract and
immortal city of the future.
{8}
Let us not too hastily deduce from these facts conclusions that
apply to man. He possesses the power of withstanding certain of
nature's laws; and to know whether such resistance be right or wrong
is the gravest and obscurest point in his morality. But it is deeply
interesting to discover what the will of nature may be in a
different world; and this will is revealed with extraordinary
clearness in the evolution of the hymenoptera, which, of all the
inhabitants of this globe, possess the highest degree of intellect
after that of man. The aim of nature is manifestly the improvement
of the race; but no less manifest is her inability, or refusal, to
obtain such improvement except at the cost of the liberty, the
rights, and the happiness of the individual. In proportion as a
society organises itself, and rises in the scale, so does a
shrinkage enter the private life of each one of its members. Where
there is progress, it is the result only of a more and more complete
sacrifice of the individual to the general interest. Each one is
compelled, first of all, to renounce his vices, which are acts of
independence. For instance, at the last stage but one of apiarian
civilisation, we find the humble-bees, which are like our cannibals.
The adult workers are incessantly hovering around the eggs, which
they seek to devour, and the mother has to display the utmost
stubbornness in their defence. Then having freed himself from his
most dangerous vices, each individual has to acquire a certain
number of more and more painful virtues. Among the humble-bees, for
instance, the workers do not dream of renouncing love, whereas our
domestic bee lives in a state of perpetual chastity. And indeed we
soon shall show how much more she has to abandon, in exchange for
the comfort and security of the hive, for its architectural,
economic, and political perfection; and we shall return to the
evolution of the hymenoptera in the chapter devoted to the progress
of the species.
II -- THE SWARM
{9}
WE will now, so as to draw more closely to nature, consider the
different episodes of the swarm as they come to pass in an ordinary
hive, which is ten or twenty times more populous than an observation
one, and leaves the bees entirely free and untrammelled.
Here, then, they have shaken off the torpor of winter. The queen
started laying again in the very first days of February, and the
workers have flocked to the willows and nut-trees, gorse and
violets, anemones and lungworts. Then spring invades the earth, and
cellar and stream with honey and pollen, while each day beholds the
birth of thousands of bees. The overgrown males now all sally forth
from their cells, and disport themselves on the combs; and so
crowded does the too prosperous city become that hundreds of belated
workers, coming back from the flowers towards evening, will vainly
seek shelter within, and will be forced to spend the night on the
threshold, where they will be decimated by the cold. Restlessness
seizes the people, and the old queen begins to stir. She feels that
a new destiny is being prepared. She has religiously fulfilled her
duty as a good creatress; and from this duty done there result only
tribulation and sorrow. An invincible power menaces her
tranquillity; she will soon be forced to quit this city of hers,
where she has reigned. But this city is her work, it is she,
herself. She is not its queen in the sense in which men use the
word. She issues no orders; she obeys, as meekly as the humblest of
her subjects, the masked power, sovereignly wise, that for the
present, and till we attempt to locate it, we will term the "spirit
of the hive." But she is the unique organ of love; she is the mother
of the city. She founded it amid uncertainty and poverty. She has
peopled it with her own substance; and all who move within its
walls--workers, males, larvae, nymphs, and the young princesses
whose approaching birth will hasten her own departure, one of them
being already designed as her successor by the "spirit of the
hive"--all these have issued from her flanks.
{10}
What is this "spirit of the hive"--where does it reside? It is not
like the special instinct that teaches the bird to construct its
well planned nest, and then seek other skies when the day for
migration returns. Nor is it a kind of mechanical habit of the race,
or blind craving for life, that will fling the bees upon any wild
hazard the moment an unforeseen event shall derange the accustomed
order of phenomena. On the contrary, be the event never so
masterful, the "spirit of the hive" still will follow it, step by
step, like an alert and quickwitted slave, who is able to derive
advantage even from his master's most dangerous orders.
It disposes pitilessly of the wealth and the happiness, the liberty
and life, of all this winged people; and yet with discretion, as
though governed itself by some great duty. It regulates day by day
the number of births, and contrives that these shall strictly accord
with the number of flowers that brighten the country-side. It
decrees the queen's deposition or warns her that she must depart; it
compels her to bring her own rivals into the world, and rears them
royally, protecting them from their mother's political hatred. So,
too, in accordance with the generosity of the flowers, the age of
the spring, and the probable dangers of the nuptial flight, will it
permit or forbid the first-born of the virgin princesses to slay in
their cradles her younger sisters, who are singing the song of the
queens. At other times, when the season wanes, and flowery hours
grow shorter, it will command the workers themselves to slaughter
the whole imperial brood, that the era of revolutions may close, and
work become the sole object of all. The "spirit of the hive" is
prudent and thrifty, but by no means parsimonious. And thus, aware,
it would seem, that nature's laws are somewhat wild and extravagant
in all that pertains to love, it tolerates, during summer days of
abundance, the embarrassing presence in the hive of three or four
hundred males, from whose ranks the queen about to be born shall
select her lover; three or four hundred foolish, clumsy, useless,
noisy creatures, who are pretentious, gluttonous, dirty, coarse,
totally and scandalously idle, insatiable, and enormous.
But after the queen's impregnation, when flowers begin to close
sooner, and open later, the spirit one morning will coldly decree
the simultaneous and general massacre of every male. It regulates
the workers' labours, with due regard to their age; it allots their
task to the nurses who tend the nymphs and the larvae, the ladies of
honour who wait on the queen and never allow her out of their sight;
the house-bees who air, refresh, or heat the hive by fanning their
wings, and hasten the evaporation of the honey that may be too
highly charged with water; the architects, masons, wax-workers, and
sculptors who form the chain and construct the combs; the foragers
who sally forth to the flowers in search of the nectar that turns
into honey, of the pollen that feeds the nymphs and the larvae, the
propolis that welds and strengthens the buildings of the city, or
the water and salt required by the youth of the nation. Its orders
have gone to the chemists who ensure the preservation of the honey
by letting a drop of formic acid fall in from the end of their
sting; to the capsule-makers who seal down the cells when the
treasure is ripe, to the sweepers who maintain public places and
streets most irreproachably clean, to the bearers whose duty it is
to remove the corpses; and to the amazons of the guard who keep
watch on the threshold by night and by day, question comers and
goers, recognise the novices who return from their very first
flight, scare away vagabonds, marauders and loiterers, expel all
intruders, attack redoubtable foes in a body, and, if need be,
barricade the entrance.
Finally, it is the spirit of the hive that fixes the hour of the
great annual sacrifice to the genius of the race: the hour, that is,
of the swarm; when we find a whole people, who have attained the
topmost pinnacle of prosperity and power, suddenly abandoning to the
generation to come their wealth and their palaces, their homes and
the fruits of their labour; themselves content to encounter the
hardships and perils of a new and distant country. This act, be it
conscious or not, undoubtedly passes the limits of human morality.
Its result will sometimes be ruin, but poverty always; and the
thrice-happy city is scattered abroad in obedience to a law superior
to its own happiness. Where has this law been decreed, which, as we
soon shall find, is by no means as blind and inevitable as one might
believe? Where, in what assembly, what council, what intellectual
and moral sphere, does this spirit reside to whom all must submit,
itself being vassal to an heroic duty, to an intelligence whose eyes
are persistently fixed on the future?
It comes to pass with the bees as with most of the things in this
world; we remark some few of their habits; we say they do this, they
work in such and such fashion, their queens are born thus, their
workers are virgin, they swarm at a certain time. And then we
imagine we know them, and ask nothing more. We watch them hasten
from flower to flower, we see the constant agitation within the
hive; their life seems very simple to us, and bounded, like every
life, by the instinctive cares of reproduction and nourishment. But
let the eye draw near, and endeavour to see; and at once the least
phenomenon of all becomes overpoweringly complex; we are confronted
by the enigma of intellect, of destiny, will, aim, means, causes;
the incomprehensible organisation of the most insignificant act of
life.
{11}
Our hive, then, is preparing to swarm; making ready for the great
immolation to the exacting gods of the race. In obedience to
the order of the spirit--an order that to us may well seem
incomprehensible, for it is entirely opposed to all our own
instincts and feelings--60,000 or 70,000 bees out of the 80,000 or
90,000 that form the whole population, will abandon the maternal
city at the prescribed hour. They will not leave at a moment of
despair; or desert, with sudden and wild resolve, a home laid waste
by famine, disease, or war. No, the exile has long been planned, and
the favourable hour patiently awaited. Were the hive poor, had it
suffered from pillage or storm, had misfortune befallen the royal
family, the bees would not forsake it. They leave it only when it
has attained the apogee of its prosperity; at a time when, after the
arduous labours of the spring, the immense palace of wax has its
120,000 well-arranged cells overflowing with new honey, and with the
many-coloured flour, known as "bees' bread," on which nymphs and
larvae are fed.
Never is the hive more beautiful than on the eve of its heroic
renouncement, in its unrivalled hour of fullest abundance and joy;
serene for all its apparent excitement and feverishness.
Let us endeavour to picture it to ourselves, not as it appears to
the bees,--for we cannot tell in what magical, formidable fashion
things may be reflected in the 6,000 or 7,000 facets of their
lateral eyes and the triple cyclopean eye on their brow,--but as it
would seem to us, were we of their stature. From the height of a
dome more colossal than that of St. Peter's at Rome waxen walls
descend to the ground, balanced in the void and the darkness;
gigantic and manifold, vertical and parallel geometric
constructions, to which, for relative precision, audacity, and
vastness, no human structure is comparable. Each of these walls,
whose substance still is immaculate and fragrant, of virginal,
silvery freshness, contains thousands of cells, that are stored with
provisions sufficient to feed the whole people for several weeks.
Here, lodged in transparent cells, are the pollens, love-ferment of
every flower of spring, making brilliant splashes of red and yellow,
of black and mauve. Close by, in twenty thousand reservoirs, sealed
with a seal that shall only be broken on days of supreme distress,
the honey of April is stored, most limpid and perfumed of all,
wrapped round with long and magnificent embroidery of gold, whose
borders hang stiff and rigid. Still lower the honey of May matures,
in great open vats, by whose side watchful cohorts maintain an
incessant current of air. In the centre, and far from the light
whose diamond rays steal in through the only opening, in the warmest
part of the hive, there stands the abode of the future; here does it
sleep, and wake. For this is the royal domain of the brood-cells,
set apart for the queen and her acolytes; about 10,000 cells wherein
the eggs repose, 15,000 or 16,000 chambers tenanted by larvae,
40,000 dwellings inhabited by white nymphs to whom thousands of
nurses minister.* And finally, in the holy of holies of these partss
are the three, four, six, or twelve sealed palaces, vast in size
compared with the others, where the adolescent princesses lie who
await their hour, wrapped in a kind of shroud, all of them
motionless and pale, and fed in the darkness.
*The figures given here are scrupulously exact. They are
those of a well-filled hive in full prosperity.
On the day, then, that the Spirit of the Hive has ordained, a
certain part of the population will go forth, selected in accordance
with sure and immovable laws, and make way for hopes that as yet are
formless. In the sleeping city there remain the males, from whose
ranks the royal lover shall come, the very young bees that tend the
brood-cells, and some thousands of workers who continue to forage
abroad, to guard the accumulated treasure, and preserve the moral
traditions of the hive. For each hive has its own code of morals.
There are some that are very virtuous and some that are very
perverse; and a careless bee-keeper will often corrupt his people,
destroy their respect for the property of others, incite them to
pillage, and induce in them habits of conquest and idleness which
will render them sources of danger to all the little republics
around. These things result from the bee's discovery that work among
distant flowers, whereof many hundreds must be visited to form one
drop of honey, is not the only or promptest method of acquiring
wealth, but that it is easier to enter ill-guarded cities by
stratagem, or force her way into others too weak for self-defence.
Nor is it easy to restore to the paths of duty a hive that has
become thus depraved.
{13}
All things go to prove that it is not the queen, but the spirit of
the hive, that decides on the swarm. With this queen of ours it
happens as with many a chief among men, who though he appear to give
orders, is himself obliged to obey commands far more mysterious, far
more inexplicable, than those he issues to his subordinates. The
hour once fixed, the spirit will probably let it be known at break
of dawn, or the previous night, if indeed not two nights before; for
scarcely has the sun drunk in the first drops of dew when a most
unaccustomed stir, whose meaning the bee-keeper rarely will fail to
grasp, is to be noticed within and around the buzzing city. At times
one would almost appear to detect a sign of dispute, hesitation,
recoil. It will happen even that for day after day a strange
emotion, apparently without cause, will appear and vanish in this
transparent, golden throng. Has a cloud that we cannot see crept
across the sky that the bees are watching; or is their intellect
battling with a new regret? Does a winged council debate the
necessity of the departure? Of this we know nothing; as we know
nothing of the manner in which the spirit conveys its resolution to
the crowd. Certain as it may seem that the bees communicate with
each other, we know not whether this be done in human fashion. It is
possible even that their own refrain may be inaudible to them: the
murmur that comes to us heavily laden with perfume of honey, the
ecstatic whisper of fairest summer days that the bee-keeper loves so
well, the festival song of labour that rises and falls around the
hive in the crystal of the hour, and might almost be the chant of
the eager flowers, hymn of their gladness and echo of their soft
fragrance, the voice of the white carnations, the marjoram, and the
thyme. They have, however, a whole gamut of sounds that we can
distinguish, ranging from profound delight to menace, distress, and
anger; they have the ode of the queen, the song of abundance, the
psalms of grief, and, lastly, the long and mysterious war-cries the
adolescent princesses send forth during the combats and massacres
that precede the nuptial flight. May this be a fortuitous music that
fails to attain their inward silence? In any event they seem not the
least disturbed at the noises we make near the hive; but they regard
these perhaps as not of their world, and possessed of no interest
for them. It is possible that we on our side hear only a fractional
part of the sounds that the bees produce, and that they have many
harmonies to which our ears are not attuned. We soon shall see with
what startling rapidity they are able to understand each other, and
adopt concerted measures, when, for instance, the great honey thief,
the huge sphinx atropos, the sinister butterfly that bears a death's
head on its back, penetrates into the hive, humming its own strange
note, which acts as a kind of irresistible incantation; the news
spreads quickly from group to group, and from the guards at the
threshold to the workers on the furthest combs, the whole population
quivers.
{14}
It was for a long time believed that when these wise bees, generally
so prudent, so far-sighted and economical, abandoned the treasures
of their kingdom and flung themselves upon the uncertainties of
life, they were yielding to a kind of irresistible folly, a
mechanical impulse, a law of the species, a decree of nature, or to
the force that for all creatures lies hidden in the revolution of
time. It is our habit, in the case of the bees no less than our own,
to regard as fatality all that we do not as yet understand. But now
that the hive has surrendered two or three of its material secrets,
we have discovered that this exodus is neither instinctive nor
inevitable. It is not a blind emigration, but apparently the
well-considered sacrifice of the present generation in favour of the
generation to come. The bee-keeper has only to destroy in their
cells the young queens that still are inert, and, at the same time,
if nymphs and larvae abound, to enlarge the store-houses and
dormitories of the nation, for this unprofitable tumult
instantaneously to subside, for work to be at once resumed, and the
flowers revisited; while the old queen, who now is essential again,
with no successor to hope for, or perhaps to fear, will renounce for
this year her desire for the light of the sun. Reassured as to the
future of the activity that will soon spring into life, she will
tranquilly resume her maternal labours, which consist in the laying
of two or three thousand eggs a day, as she passes, in a methodical
spiral, from cell to cell, omitting none, and never pausing to rest.
Where is the fatality here, save in the love of the race of to-day
for the race of to-morrow? This fatality exists in the human species
also, but its extent and power seem infinitely less. Among men it
never gives rise to sacrifices as great, as unanimous, or as
complete. What far-seeing fatality, taking the place of this one, do
we ourselves obey? We know not; as we know not the being who watches
us as we watch the bees.
But the hive that we have selected is disturbed in its history by no
interference of man; and as the beautiful day advances with radiant
and tranquil steps beneath the trees, its ardour, still bathed in
dew, makes the appointed hour seem laggard. Over the whole surface
of the golden corridors that divide the parallel walls the workers
are busily making preparation for the journey. And each one will
first of all burden herself with provision of honey sufficient for
five or six days. From this honey that they bear within them they
will distil, by a chemical process still unexplained, the wax
required for the immediate construction of buildings. They will
provide themselves also with a certain amount of propolis, a kind of
resin with which they will seal all the crevices in the new
dwelling, strengthen weak places, varnish the walls, and exclude the
light; for the bees love to work in almost total obscurity, guiding
themselves with their many-faceted eyes, or with their antennae
perhaps, the seat, it would seem, of an unknown sense that fathoms
and measures the darkness.
{16}
They are not without prescience, therefore, of what is to befall
them on this the most dangerous day of all their existence. Absorbed
by the cares, the prodigious perils of this mighty adventure, they
will have no time now to visit the gardens and meadows; and
to-morrow, and after tomorrow, it may happen that rain may fall, or
there may be wind; that their wings may be frozen or the flowers
refuse to open. Famine and death would await them were it not for
this foresight of theirs. None would come to their help, nor would
they seek help of any. For one city knows not the other, and
assistance never is given. And even though the bee-keeper deposit
the hive, in which he has gathered the old queen and her attendant
cluster of bees, by the side of the abode they have but this moment
quitted, they would seem, be the disaster never so great that shall
now have befallen them, to have wholly forgotten the peace and the
happy activity that once they had known there, the abundant wealth
and the safety that had then been their portion; and all, one by
one, and down to the last of them, will perish of hunger and cold
around their unfortunate queen rather than return to the home of
their birth, whose sweet odour of plenty, the fragrance, indeed, of
their own past assiduous labour, reaches them even in their
distress.
{17}
That is a thing, some will say, that men would not do,--a proof that
the bee, notwithstanding the marvels of its organisation, still is
lacking in intellect and veritable consciousness. Is this so
certain? Other beings, surely, may possess an intellect that differs
from ours, and produces different results, without therefore being
inferior. And besides, are we, even in this little human parish of
ours, such infallible judges of matters that pertain to the spirit?
Can we so readily divine the thoughts that may govern the two or
three people we may chance to see moving and talking behind a closed
window, when their words do not reach us? Or let us suppose that an
inhabitant of Venus or Mars were to contemplate us from the height
of a mountain, and watch the little black specks that we form in
space, as we come and go in the streets and squares of our towns.
Would the mere sight of our movements, our buildings, machines, and
canals, convey to him any precise idea of our morality, intellect,
our manner of thinking, and loving, and hoping,--in a word, of our
real and intimate self? All he could do, like ourselves when we gaze
at the hive, would be to take note of some facts that seem very
surprising; and from these facts to deduce conclusions probably no
less erroneous, no less uncertain, than those that we choose to form
concerning the bee.