can form an adequate conception of the arrangement and aspect of the
combs. Let them imagine--we will take a peasant's hive, where the
bee is left entirely to its own resources--let them imagine a dome
of straw or osier, divided from top to bottom by five, six, eight,
sometimes ten, strips of wax, resembling somewhat great slices of
bread, that run in strictly parallel lines from the top of the dome
to the floor, espousing closely the shape of the ovoid walls.
Between these strips is contrived a space of about half an inch, to
enable the bees to stand and to pass each other. At the moment when
they begin to construct one of these strips at the top of the hive,
the waxen wall (which is its rough model, and will later be thinned
and extended) is still very thick, and completely excludes the fifty
or sixty bees at work on its inner face from the fifty or sixty
simultaneously engaged in carving the outer, so that it is wholly
impossible for one group to see the other, unless indeed their sight
be able to penetrate opaque matter. And yet there is not a hole that
is scooped on the inner surface, not a fragment of wax that is
added, but corresponds with mathematical precision to a protuberance
or cavity on the outer surface, and vice versa. How does this
happen? How is it that one does not dig too deep, another not deep
enough? Whence the invariable magical coincidence between the angles
of the lozenges? What is it tells the bees that at this point they
must begin, and at that point stop? Once again we must content
ourselves with the reply, that is no reply: "It is a mystery of the
hive."
Huber has sought to explain this mystery by suggesting that the
pressure of the bees' hooks and teeth may possibly produce slight
projections, at regular intervals, on the opposite side of the comb;
or that they may be able to estimate the thickness of the block by
the flexibility, elasticity, or some other physical quality of the
wax; or again, that their antennae, which seem so well adapted for
the questioning of the finer, less evident side of things, may serve
as a compass in the invisible; or, lastly, that the position of
every cell may derive mathematically from the arrangement and
dimensions of the cells on the first row, and thus dispense with the
need for further measurement. But these explanations are evidently
insufficient; the first are mere hypotheses that cannot be verified,
the others do no more than transplant the mystery. And useful as it
may be to transplant mystery as often as we possibly can, it were
not wise to imagine that a mystery has ceased to be because we have
shifted its home.
{61}
Now let us leave these dreary building grounds, this geometrical
desert of cells. The combs have been started, and are becoming
habitable. Though it be here the infinitely little that, without
apparent hope, adds itself to the infinitely little; though our eye
with its limited vision look and see nothing, the work of wax,
halting neither by day nor by night, will advance with incredible
quickness. The impatient queen already has more than once paced the
stockades that gleam white in the darkness; and no sooner is the
first row of dwellings complete than she takes possession with her
escort of counsellors, guardians, or servants--for we know not
whether she lead or be led, be venerated or supervised. When the
spot has been reached that she, or her urgent advisers, may regard
as favourable, she arches her back, bends forward, and introduces
the extremity of her long spindle-shaped abdomen into one of the
cells; the-little eager heads of her escort meanwhile forming a
passionate circle around her, watching her with their enormous black
eyes, supporting her, caressing her wings, and waving their feverish
antennae as though to encourage, incite, or congratulate. You may
easily discover the spot where the queen shall be found by the sort
of starry cockade, or oval brooch perhaps of the imposing kind our
grandmothers used to wear, of which she forms the central stone. And
one may mention here the curious fact that the workers always avoid
turning their back on the queen. No sooner has she approached a
group than they will invariably arrange themselves so as to face her
with eyes and antennae, and to walk backwards before her. It is a
token of respect, or of solicitude, that, unlikely as it may seem,
is nevertheless constant and general. But to return to the queen.
During the slight spasm that visibly accompanies the emission of an
egg, one of her daughters will often throw her arms round her and
appear to be whispering to her, brow pressed to brow and mouth to
mouth. But the queen, in no wise disturbed by this somewhat bold
demonstration, takes her time, tranquilly, calmly, wholly absorbed
by the mission that would seem amorous delight to her rather than
labour. And after some seconds she will rise, very quietly, take a
step back, execute a slight turn on herself, and proceed to the next
cell, into which she will first, before introducing her abdomen, dip
her head to make sure that all is in order and that she is not
laying twice in the same cell; and in the meanwhile two or three of
her escort will have plunged into the cell she has quitted to see
whether the work be duly accomplished, and to care for, and tenderly
house, the little bluish egg she has laid.
From this moment, up to the first frosts of autumn, she does not
cease laying; she lays while she is being fed, and even in her
sleep, if indeed she sleeps at all, she still lays. She represents
henceforth the devouring force of the future, which invades every
corner of the kingdom. Step by step she pursues the unfortunate
workers who are exhaustedly, feverishly erecting the cradles her
fecundity demands. We have here the union of two mighty instincts;
and their workings throw into light, though they leave unresolved,
many an enigma of the hive.
It will happen, for instance, that the workers will distance her,
and acquire a certain start; whereupon, mindful of their duties as
careful housewives to provide for the bad days ahead, they hasten to
fill with honey the cells they have wrested from the avidity of the
species. But the queen approaches; material wealth must give way to
the scheme of nature; and the distracted workers are compelled with
all speed to remove the importunate treasure.
But assume them to be a whole comb ahead, and to have no longer
before them her who stands for the tyranny of days they shall none
of them see; we find then that they eagerly, hurriedly, build a zone
of large cells, cells for males; whose construction is very much
easier, and far more rapid. When the queen in her turn attains this
unthankful zone, she will regretfully lay a few eggs there, then
cease, pass beyond, and clamour for more workers' cells. Her
daughters obey; little by little they reduce the cells; and then the
pursuit starts afresh, till at last the insatiable mother shall have
traversed the whole circumference of the hive, and have returned to
the first cells. These, by this time, will be empty; for the first
generation will have sprung into life, soon to go forth, from their
shadowy corner of birth, disperse over the neighbouring blossoms,
people the rays of the sun and quicken the smiling hours; and then
sacrifice themselves in their turn to the new generations that are
already filling their place in the cradles.
{62}
And whom does the queen-bee obey? She is ruled by nourishment given
her; for she does not take her own food, but is fed like a child by
the very workers whom her fecundity harasses. And the food these
workers deal out is nicely proportioned to the abundance of flowers,
to the spoil brought back by those who visit the calyces. Here,
then, as everywhere else in the world, one part of the circle is
wrapped in darkness; here, as everywhere, it is from without, from
an unknown power, that the supreme order issues; and the bees, like
ourselves, obey the nameless lord of the wheel that incessantly
turns on itself, and crushes the wills that have set it in motion.
Some little time back, I conducted a friend to one of my hives of
glass, and showed him the movements of this wheel, which was as
readily perceptible as the great wheel of a clock; showed him, in
all its bareness, the universal agitation on every comb, the
perpetual, frantic, bewildered haste of the nurses around the
brood-cells; the living gangways and ladders formed by the makers of
wax, the abounding, unceasing activity of the entire population, and
their pitiless, useless effort; the ardent, feverish coming and
going of all, the general absence of sleep save in the cradles
alone, around which continuous labour kept watch; the denial of even
the repose of death in a home which permits no illness and accords
no grave; and my friend, his astonishment over, soon turned his eyes
away, and in them I could read the signs of I know not what saddened
fear.
And truly, underlying the gladness that we note first of all in the
hive, underlying the dazzling memories of beautiful days that render
it the storehouse of summer's most precious jewels, underlying the
blissful journeys that knit it so close to the flowers and to
running water, to the sky, to the peaceful abundance of all that
makes for beauty and happiness--underlying all these exterior joys,
there reposes a sadness as deep as the eye of man can behold. And
we, who dimly gaze on these things with our own blind eyes, we know
full well that it is not they alone that we are striving to see, not
they alone that we cannot understand, but that before us there lies
a pitiable form of the great power that quickens us also.
Sad let it be, as all things in nature are sad, when our eyes rest
too closely upon them. And thus it ever shall be so long as we know
not her secret, know not even whether secret truly there be. And
should we discover some day that there is no secret, or that the
secret is monstrous, other duties will then arise that, as yet,
perhaps, have no name. Let our heart, if it will, in the meanwhile
repeat, "It is sad;" but let our reason be content to add, "Thus it
is." At the present hour the duty before us is to seek out that
which perhaps may be hiding behind these sorrows; and, urged on by
this endeavour, we must not turn our eyes away, but steadily,
fixedly, watch these sorrows and study them, with a courage and
interest as keen as though they were joys. It is right that before
we judge nature, before we complain, we should at least ask every
question that we can possibly ask.
{63}
We have seen that the workers, when free for the moment from the
threatening fecundity of the queen, hasten to erect cells for
provisions, whose construction is more economical and capacity
greater. We have seen, too, that the queen prefers to lay in the
smaller cells, for which she is incessantly clamouring. When these
are wanting, however, or till they be provided, she resigns herself
to laying her eggs in the large cells she finds on her road.
These eggs, though absolutely identical with those from which
workers are hatched, will give birth to males, or drones. Now,
conversely to what takes place when a worker is turned into queen,
it is here neither the form nor the capacity of the cell that
produces this change; for from an egg laid in a large cell and
afterwards transferred to that of a worker (a most difficult
operation, because of the microscopic minuteness and extreme
fragility of the egg, but one that I have four or five times
successfully accomplished) there will issue an undeniable male,
though more or less atrophied. It follows, therefore, that the queen
must possess the power, while laying, of knowing or determining the
sex of the egg, and of adapting it to the cell over which she is
bending. She will rarely make a mistake. How does she contrive, from
among the myriad eggs her ovaries contain, to separate male from
female, and lower them, at will, into the unique oviduct?
Here, yet again, there confronts us an enigma of the hive; and in
this case one of the most unfathomable. We know that the virgin
queen is not sterile; but the eggs that she lays will produce only
males. It is not till after the impregnation of the nuptial flight
that she can produce workers or drones at will. The nuptial flight
places her permanently in possession, till death, of the spermatozoa
torn from her unfortunate lover. These spermatozoa, whose number Dr.
Leuckart estimates at twenty-five millions, are preserved alive in a
special gland known as the spermatheca, that is situate under the
ovaries, at the entrance to the common oviduct. It is imagined that
the narrow aperture of the smaller cells, and the manner in which
the form of this aperture compels the queen to bend forward,
exercise a certain pressure upon the spermatheca, in consequence of
which the spermatozoa spring forth and fecundate the egg as it
passes. In the large cells this pressure would not take place, and
the spermatheca would therefore not open. Others, again, believe
that the queen has perfect control over the muscles that open and
close the spermatheca on the vagina; and these muscles are certainly
very numerous, complex, and powerful. For myself, I incline to the
second of these hypotheses, though I do not for a moment pretend to
decide which is the more correct; for indeed, the further we go and
the more closely we study, the more plainly is it brought home to us
that we merely are waifs shipwrecked on the ocean of nature; and
ever and anon, from a sudden wave that shall be more transparent
than others, there leaps forth a fact that in an instant confounds
all we imagined we knew. But the reason of my preferring the second
theory is that, for one thing, the experiments of a Bordeaux
bee-keeper, M. Drory, have shown that in cases where all the large
cells have been removed from the hive, the mother will not hesitate,
when the moment for laying male eggs has come, to deposit these in
workers' cells; and that, inversely, she will lay workers' eggs in
cells provided for males, if she have no others at her disposal.
And, further, we learn from the interesting observations of M. Fabre
on the Osmiae, which are wild and olitary bees of the Gastrilegidae
family, that not only does the Osmia know in advance the sex of the
egg she will lay, but that this sex is "optional for the mother, who
decides it in accordance with the space of which she disposes; this
space being often governed by chance and not to be modified; and she
will deposit a male egg here and a female there." I shall not enter
into the details of the great French entomologist's experiments, for
they are exceedingly minute, and would take us too far. But
whichever be the hypothesis we prefer to accept, either will serve
to explain the queen's inclination to lay her eggs in workers'
cells, without it being necessary to credit her with the least
concern for the future.
It is not impossible that this slave-mother, whom we are inclined to
pity, may be indeed a great amorist, a great voluptuary, deriving a
certain enjoyment, an after-taste, as it were, of her one
marriage-flight, from the union of the male and female principle
that thus comes to pass in her being. Here again nature, never so
ingenious, so cunningly prudent and diverse, as when contriving her
snares of love, will not have failed to provide a certain pleasure
as a bait in the interest of the species. And yet let us pause for a
moment, and not become the dupes of our own explanation. For indeed,
to attribute an idea of this kind to nature, and regard that as
sufficient, is like flinging a stone into an unfathomable gulf we
may find in the depths of a grotto, and imagining that the sounds it
creates as it falls shall answer our every question, or reveal to us
aught beside the immensity of the abyss.
When we say to ourselves, "This thing is of nature's devising;
she has ordained this marvel; those are her desires that we see
before us!" the fact is merely that our special attention has been
drawn to some tiny manifestation of life upon the boundless surface
of matter that we deem inactive, and choose to describe, with
evident inaccuracy, as nothingness and death. A purely fortuitous
chain of events has allowed this special manifestation to attract
our attention; but a thousand others, no less interesting, perhaps,
and informed with no less intelligence, have vanished, not meeting
with a like good-fortune, and have lost for ever the chance of
exciting our wonder. It were rash to affirm aught beside; and all
that remains, our reflections, our obstinate search for the final
cause, our admiration and hopes--all these in truth are no more than
our feeble cry as, in the depths of the unknown, we clash against
what is more unknowable still; and this feeble cry declares the
highest degree of individual existence attainable for us on this
mute and impenetrable surface, even as the flight of the condor, the
song of the nightingale, reveal to them the highest degree of
existence their species allows. But the evocation of this feeble
cry, whenever opportunity offers, is none the less one of our most
unmistakable duties; nor should we let ourselves be discouraged by
its apparent futility.
V -- THE YOUNG QUEENS
{64}
HERE let us close our hive, where we find that life is reassuming
its circular movement, is extending and multiplying, to be again
divided as soon as it shall attain the fulness of its happiness and
strength; and let us for the last time reopen the mother-city, and
see what is happening there after the departure of the swarm.
The tumult having subsided, the hapless city, that two thirds of her
children have abandoned for ever, becomes feeble, empty, moribund;
like a body from which the blood has been drained. Some thousands of
bees have remained, however; and these, though a trifle languid
perhaps, are still immovably faithful to the duty a precise destiny
has laid upon them, still conscious of the part that they have
themselves to play; they resume their labours, therefore, fill as
best they can the place of those who have gone, remove all trace of
the orgy, carefully house the provisions that have escaped pillage,
sally forth to the flowers again, and keep scrupulous guard over the
hostages of the future.
And for all that the moment may appear gloomy, hope abounds wherever
the eye may turn. We might be in one of the castles of German
legend, whose walls are composed of myriad phials containing the
souls of men about to be born. For we are in the abode of life that
goes before life. On all sides, asleep in their closely sealed
cradles, in this infinite superposition of marvellous six-sided
cells, lie thousands of nymphs, whiter than milk, who with folded
arms and head bent forward await the hour of awakening. In their
uniform tombs, that, isolated, become nearly transparent, they seem
almost like hoary gnomes, lost in deep thought, or legions of
virgins whom the folds of the shroud have contorted, who are buried
in hexagonal prisms that some inflexible geometrician has multiplied
to the verge of delirium.
Over the entire area that the vertical walls enclose, and in the
midst of this growing world that so soon shall transform itself,
that shall four or five times in succession assume fresh vestments,
and then spin its own winding-sheet in the shadow, hundreds of
workers are dancing and flapping their wings. They appear thus to
generate the necessary heat, and accomplish some other object
besides that is still more obscure; for this dance of theirs
contains some extraordinary movements, so methodically conceived
that they must infallibly answer some purpose which no observer has
as yet, I believe, been able to divine.
A few days more, and the lids of these myriad urns--whereof a
considerable hive will contain from sixty to eighty thousand--will
break, and two large and earnest black eyes will appear, surmounted
by antennae that already are groping at life, while active jaws are
busily engaged in enlarging the opening from within. The nurses at
once come running; they help the young bee to emerge from her
prison, they clean her and brush her, and at the tip of their tongue
present the first honey of the new life. But the bee, that has come
from another world, is bewildered still, trembling and pale; she
wears the feeble look of a little old man who might have escaped
from his tomb, or perhaps of a traveller strewn with the powdery
dust of the ways that lead unto life. She is perfect, however, from
head to foot; she knows at once all that has to be known; and, like
the children of the people, who learn, as it were, at their birth,
that for them there shall never be time to play or to laugh, she
instantly makes her way to the cells that are closed, and proceeds
to beat her wings and to dance in cadence, so that she in her turn
may quicken her buried sisters; nor does she for one instant pause
to decipher the astounding enigma of her destiny, or her race.
{65}
The most arduous labours will, however, at first be spared her. A
week must elapse from the day of her birth before she will quit the
hive; she will then perform her first "cleansing flight," and absorb
the air into her tracheae, which, filling, expand her body, and
proclaim her the bride of space. Thereupon she returns to the hive,
and waits yet one week more; and then, with her sisters born the
same day as herself, she will for the first time set forth to visit
the flowers. A special emotion now will lay hold of her; one that
French apiarists term the "soleil d'artifice," but which might more
rightly perhaps be called the "sun of disquiet." For it is evident
that the bees are afraid, that these daughters of the crowd, of
secluded darkness, shrink from the vault of blue, from the infinite
loneliness of the light; and their joy is halting, and woven of
terror. They cross the threshold and pause; they depart, they
return, twenty times. They hover aloft in the air, their head
persistently turned to the home; they describe great soaring circles
that suddenly sink beneath the weight of regret; and their thirteen
thousand eyes will question, reflect, and retain the trees and the
fountain, the gate and the walls, the neighbouring windows and
houses, till at last the aerial course whereon their return shall
glide have become as indelibly stamped in their memory as though it
were marked in space by two lines of steel.
{66}
A new mystery confronts us here, which we shall do well to
challenge; for though it reply not, its silence still will extend
the field of our conscious ignorance, which is the most fertile of
all that our activity knows. How do the bees contrive to find their
way back to the hive that they cannot possibly see, that is hidden,
perhaps, by the trees, that in any event must form an imperceptible
point in space? How is it that if taken in a box to a spot two or
three miles from their home, they will almost invariably succeed in
finding their way back?