silence of winter--I am anxious to meet the objection invariably
urged by those to whom we reveal the astounding industry and policy
of the bees. Yes, they will say, that is all very wonderful; but
then, it has never been otherwise. The bees have for thousands of
years dwelt under remarkable laws, but during those thousands of
years the laws have not varied. For thousands of years they have
constructed their marvellous combs, whereto we can add nothing,
wherefrom we can take nothing,--combs that unite in equal perfection
the science of the chemist, the geometrician, the architect, and the
engineer; but on the sarcophagi, on Egyptian stones and papyri, we
find drawings of combs that are identical in every particular. Name
a single fact that will show the least progress, a single instance
of their having contrived some new feature or modified their
habitual routine, and we will cheerfully yield, and admit that they
not only possess an admirable instinct, but have also an intellect
worthy to approach that of man, worthy to share in one knows not
what higher destiny than awaits unconscious and submissive matter.
This language is not even confined to the profane; it is made use of
by entomologists of the rank of Kirby and Spence, in order to deny
the bees the possession of intellect other than may vaguely stir
within the narrow prison of an extraordinary but unchanging
instinct. "Show us," they say, "a single case where the pressure of
events has inspired them with the idea, for instance, of
substituting clay or mortar for wax or propolis; show us this, and
we will admit their capacity for reasoning."
This argument, that Romanes refers to as the "question-begging
argument," and that might also be termed the "insatiable argument,"
is exceedingly dangerous, and, if applied to man, would take us very
far. Examine it closely, and you find that it emanates from the
"mere common-sense," which is often so harmful; the "common-sense"
that replied to Galileo: "The earth does not turn, for I can see the
sun move in the sky, rise in the morning and sink in the evening;
and nothing can prevail over the testimony of my eyes." Common-sense
makes an admirable, and necessary, background for the mind; but
unless it be watched by a lofty disquiet ever ready to remind it,
when occasion demand, of the infinity of its ignorance, it dwindles
into the mere routine of the baser side of our intellect. But the
bees have themselves answered the objection Messrs. Kirby and Spence
advanced. Scarcely had it been formulated when another naturalist,
Andrew Knight, having covered the bark of some diseased trees with a
kind of cement made of turpentine and wax, discovered that his bees
were entirely renouncing the collection of propolis, and exclusively
using this unknown matter, which they had quickly tested and
adopted, and found in abundant quantities, ready prepared, in the
vicinity of their dwelling.
And indeed, one-half of the science and practice of apiculture
consists in giving free rein to the spirit of initiative possessed
by the bees, and in providing their enterprising intellect with
opportunities for veritable discoveries and veritable inventions.
Thus, for instance, to aid in the rearing of the larvae and nymphs,
the bee-keeper will scatter a certain quantity of flour close to the
hive when the pollen is scarce of which these consume an enormous
quantity. In a state of nature, in the heart of their native forests
in the Asiatic valleys, where they existed probably long before the
tertiary epoch, the bees can evidently never have met with a
substance of this kind. And yet, if care be taken to "bait" some of
them with it, by placing them on the flour, they will touch it and
test it, they will perceive that its properties more or less
resemble those possessed by the dust of the anthers; they will
spread the news among their sisters, and we shall soon find every
forager hastening to this unexpected, incomprehensible food, which,
in their hereditary memory, must be inseparable from the calyx of
flowers where their flight, for so many centuries past, has been
sumptuously and voluptuously welcomed.
{98}
It is a little more than a hundred years ago that Huber's researches
gave the first serious impetus to our study of the bees, and
revealed the elementary important truths that allowed us to observe
them with fruitful result. Barely fifty years have passed since the
foundation of rational, practical apiculture was rendered possible
by means of the movable combs and frames devised by Dzierzon and
Langstroth, and the hive ceased to be the inviolable abode wherein
all came to pass in a mystery from which death alone stripped the
veil. And lastly, less than fifty years have elapsed since the
improvements of the microscope, of the entomologist's laboratory,
revealed the precise secret of the principal organs of the workers,
of the mother, and the males. Need we wonder if our knowledge be as
scanty as our experience? The bees have existed many thousands of
years; we have watched them for ten or twelve lustres. And if it
could even be proved that no change has occurred in the hive since
we first opened it, should we have the right to conclude that
nothing had changed before our first questioning glance? Do we not
know that in the evolution of species a century is but as a drop of
rain that is caught in the whirl of the river, and that millenaries
glide as swiftly over the life of universal matter as single years
over the history of a people?
{99}
But there is no warrant for the statement that the habits of the
bees are unchanged. If we examine them with an unbiassed eye, and
without emerging from the small area lit by our actual experience,
we shall, on the contrary, discover marked variations. And who shall
tell how many escape us? Were an observer of a hundred and fifty
times our height and about seven hundred and fifty thousand times
our importance (these being the relations of stature and weight in
which we stand to the humble honey-fly), one who knew not our
language, and was endowed with senses totally different from our
own; were such an one to have been studying us, he would recognise
certain curious material transformations in the course of the last
two thirds of the century, but would be totally unable to form any
conception of our moral, social, political, economic or religious
evolution.
The most likely of all the scientific hypotheses will presently
permit us to connect our domestic bee with the great tribe of the
"Apiens," which embraces all wild bees, and where its ancestors are
probably to be found. We shall then perceive physiological, social,
economic, industrial, and architectural transformations more
extraordinary than those of our human evolution. But for the moment
we will limit ourselves to our domestic bee properly so called. Of
these sixteen fairly distinct species are known; but, essentially,
whether we consider the Apis Dorsata, the largest known to us, or
the Apis Florea, which is the smallest, the insect is always exactly
the same, except for the slight modifications induced by the climate
and by the conditions whereto it has had to conform.*
*The scientific classification of the domestic bee is as follows:
Class....... Insecta
Order....... Hymenoptera
Family...... Apidae
Genus....... Apis
Species..... Mellifica
The term "Mellifica" is that of the Linnaean classification. It is
not of the happiest, for all the Apidae, with the exception of
certain parasites perhaps, are producers of honey. Scopoli uses the
term "Cerifera "; Reaumur "Domestica "; Geoffroy "Gregaria." The
"Apis Ligustica," the Italian bee, is another variety of the
"Mellifica."
The difference between these various species is scarcely greater
than that between an Englishman and a Russian, a Japanese and a
European. In these preliminary remarks, therefore, we will confine
ourselves to what actually lies within the range of our eyes,
refusing the aid of hypothesis, be this never so probable or so
imperious. We shall mention no facts that are not susceptible of
immediate proof; and of such facts we will only rapidly refer to
some of the more significant.
{100}
Let us consider first of all the most important and most radical
improvement, one that in the case of man would have called for
prodigious labour: the external protection of the community.
The bees do not, like ourselves, dwell in towns free to the sky, and
exposed to the caprice of rain and storm, but in cities entirely
covered with a protecting envelope. In a state of nature, however,
in an ideal climate, this is not the case. If they listened only to
their essential instinct, they would construct their combs in the
open air. In the Indies, the Apis Dorsata will not eagerly seek
hollow trees, or a hole in the rocks. The swarm will hang from the
crook of a branch; and the comb will be lengthened, the queen lay
her eggs, provisions be stored, with no shelter other than that
which the workers' own bodies provide. Our Northern bees have at
times been known to revert to this instinct, under the deceptive
influence of a too gentle sky; and swarms have been found living in
the heart of a bush. But even in the Indies, the result of this
habit, which would seem innate, is by no means favourable. So
considerable a number of the workers are compelled to remain on one
spot, occupied solely with the maintenance of the heat required by
those who are moulding the wax and rearing the brood, that the Apis
Dorsata, hanging thus from the branches, will construct but a single
comb; whereas if she have the least shelter she will erect four or
five, or more, and will proportionately increase the prosperity and
the population of the colony. And indeed we find that all species of
bees existing in cold and temperate regions have abandoned this
primitive method. The intelligent initiative of the insect has
evidently received the sanction of natural selection, which has
allowed only the most numerous and best protected tribes to survive
our winters. What had been merely an idea, therefore, and opposed to
instinct, has thus by slow degrees become an instinctive habit. But
it is none the less true that in forsaking the vast light of nature
that was so dear to them and seeking shelter in the obscure hollow
of a tree or a cavern, the bees have followed what at first was an
audacious idea, based on observation, probably, on experience and
reasoning. And this idea might be almost declared to have been as
important to the destinies of the domestic bee as was the invention
of fire to the destinies of man.
{101}
This great progress, not the less actual for being hereditary and
ancient, was followed by an infinite variety of details which prove
that the industry, and even the policy, of the hive have not
crystallised into infrangible formulae. We have already mentioned
the intelligent substitution of flour for pollen, and of an
artificial cement for propolis. We have seen with what skill the
bees are able to adapt to their needs the occasionally disconcerting
dwellings into which they are introduced, and the surprising
adroitness wherewith they turn combs of foundation-wax to good
account. They display extraordinary ingenuity in their manner of
handling these marvellous combs, which are so strangely useful, and
yet incomplete. In point of fact, they meet man half-way. Let us
imagine that we had for centuries past been erecting cities, not
with stones, bricks, and lime, but with some pliable substance
painfully secreted by special organs of our body. One day an
all-powerful being places us in the midst of a fabulous city. We
recognise that it is made of a substance similar to the one that we
secrete, but, as regards the rest, it is a dream, whereof what is
logical is so distorted, so reduced, and as it were concentrated, as
to be more disconcerting almost than had it been incoherent. Our
habitual plan is there; in fact, we find everything that we had
expected; but all has been put together by some antecedent force
that would seem to have crushed it, arrested it in the mould, and to
have hindered its completion. The houses whose height must attain
some four or five yards are the merest protuberances, that our two
hands can cover. Thousands of walls are indicated by signs that hint
at once of their plan and material. Elsewhere there are marked
deviations, which must be corrected; gaps to be filled and
harmoniously joined to the rest, vast surfaces that are unstable and
will need support. The enterprise is hopeful, but full of hardship
and danger. It would seem to have been conceived by some sovereign
intelligence, that was able to divine most of our desires, but has
executed them clumsily, being hampered by its very vastness. We must
disentangle, therefore, what now is obscure, we must develop the
least intentions of the supernatural donor; we must build in a few
days what would ordinarily take us years; we must renounce organic
habits, and fundamentally alter our methods of labour. It is certain
that all the attention man could devote would not be excessive for
the solution of the problems that would arise, or for the turning to
fullest account the help thus offered by a magnificent providence.
Yet that is, more or less, what the bees are doing in our modern
hives.*
*As we are now concerned with the construction of the bee,
we may note, in passing, a strange peculiarity of the Apis
Florea. Certain walls of its cells for males are cylindrical
instead of hexagonal. Apparently she has not yet succeeded
in passing from one form to the other, and indefinitely
adopting the better.
{102}
I have said that even the policy of the bees is probably subject to
change. This point is the obscurest of all, and the most difficult
to verify. I shall not dwell on their various methods of treating
the queens, or the laws as to swarming that are peculiar to the
inhabitants of every hive, and apparently transmitted from
generation to generation, etc.; but by the side of these facts which
are not sufficiently established are others so precise and unvarying
as to prove that the same degree of political civilisation has not
been attained by all races of the domestic bee, and that, among some
of them, the public spirit still is groping its way, seeking perhaps
another solution of the royal problem. The Syrian bee, for instance,
habitually rears 120 queens and often more, whereas our Apis
Mellifica will rear ten or twelve at most. Cheshire tells of a
Syrian hive, in no way abnormal, where 120 dead queen-mothers were
found, and 90 living, unmolested queens. This may be the point of
departure, or the point of arrival, of a strange social evolution,
which it would be interesting to study more thoroughly. We may add
that as far as the rearing of queens is concerned, the Cyprian bee
approximates to the Syrian. And finally, there is yet another fact
which establishes still more clearly that the customs and prudent
organisation of the hive are not the results of a primitive impulse,
mechanically followed through different ages and climates, but that
the spirit which governs the little republic is fully as capable of
taking note of new conditions and turning these to the best
advantage, as in times long past it was capable of meeting the
dangers that hemmed it around. Transport our black bee to California
or Australia, and her habits will completely alter. Finding that
summer is perpetual and flowers forever abundant, she will after one
or two years be content to live from day to day, and gather
sufficient honey and pollen for the day's consumption; and, her
thoughtful observation of these new features triumphing over
hereditary experience, she will cease to make provision for the
winter.* In fact it becomes necessary, in order to stimulate her
activity, to deprive her systematically of the fruits of her labour.
*Buchner cites an analogous fact. In the Barbadoes, the bees
whose hives are in the midst of the refineries, where they
find sugar in abundance during the whole year, will entirely
abandon their visits to the flowers.
{103}
So much for what our own eyes can see. It will be admitted that we
have mentioned some curious facts, which by no means support the
theory that every intelligence is arrested, every future clearly
defined, save only the intelligence and future of man.
But if we choose to accept for one moment the hypothesis of
evolution, the spectacle widens, and its uncertain, grandiose light
soon attains our own destinies. Whoever brings careful attention to
bear will scarcely deny, even though it be not evident, the presence
in nature of a will that tends to raise a portion of matter to a
subtler and perhaps better condition, and to penetrate its substance
little by little with a mystery-laden fluid that we at first term
life, then instinct, and finally intelligence; a will that, for an
end we know not, organises, strengthens, and facilitates the
existence of all that is. There can be no certainty, and yet many
instances invite us to believe that, were an actual estimate
possible, the quantity of matter that has raised itself from its
beginnings would be found to be ever increasing. A fragile remark, I
admit, but the only one we can make on the hidden force that leads
us; and it stands for much in a world where confidence in life,
until certitude to the contrary reach us, must remain the first of
all our duties, at times even when life itself conveys no
encouraging clearness to us.
I know all that may be urged against the theory of evolution. In its
favour are numerous proofs and most powerful arguments, which yet do
not carry irresistible conviction. We must beware of abandoning
ourselves unreservedly to the prevailing truths of our time. A
hundred years hence, many chapters of a book instinct to-day with
this truth, will appear as ancient as the philosophical writings of
the eighteenth century seem to us now, full as they are of a too
perfect and non-existing man, or as so many works of the seventeenth
century, whose value is lessened by their conception of a harsh and
narrow god.
Nevertheless, when it is impossible to know what the truth of a
thing may be, it is well to accept the hypothesis that appeals the
most urgently to the reason of men at the period when we happen to
have come into the world. The chances are that it will be false; but
so long as we believe it to be true it will serve a useful purpose
by restoring our courage and stimulating research in a new
direction. It might at the first glance seem wiser, perhaps, instead
of advancing these ingenious suppositions, simply to say the
profound truth, which is that we do not know. But this truth could
only be helpful were it written that we never shall know. In the
meanwhile it would induce a state of stagnation within us more
pernicious than the most vexatious illusions. We are so constituted
that nothing takes us further or leads us higher than the leaps made
by our errors. In point of fact we owe the little we have learned to
hypotheses that were always hazardous and often absurd, and, as a
general rule, less discreet than they are to-day. They were unwise,
perhaps, but they kept alive the ardour for research. To the
traveller, shivering with cold, who reaches the human Hostelry, it
matters little whether he by whose side he seats himself, he who has
guarded the hearth, be blind or very old. So long as the fire still
burn that he has been watching, he has done as much as the best
could have done. Well for us if we can transmit this ardour, not as
we received it, but added to by ourselves; and nothing will add to
it more than this hypothesis of evolution, which goads us to
question with an ever severer method and ever increasing zeal all
that exists on the earth's surface and in its entrails, in the
depths of the sea and expanse of the sky. Reject it, and what can we
set up against it, what can we put in its place? There is but the
grand confession of scientific ignorance, aware of its knowing
nothing--but this is habitually sluggish, and calculated to
discourage the curiosity more needful to man than wisdom--or the
hypothesis of the fixity of the species and of divine creation,
which is less demonstrable than the other, banishes for all time
the living elements of the problem, and explains nothing.
{104}
Of wild bees approximately 4500 varieties are known. It need
scarcely be said that we shall not go through the list. Some day,
perhaps, a profound study, and searching experiments and
observations of a kind hitherto unknown, that would demand more than
one lifetime, will throw a decisive light upon the history of the
bee's evolution. All that we can do now is to enter this veiled
region of supposition, and, discarding all positive statement,
attempt to follow a tribe of hymenoptera in their progress towards a
more intelligent existence, towards a little more security and
comfort, lightly indicating the salient features of this ascension
that is spread over many thousands of years. The tribe in question
is already known to us; it is that of the "Apiens," whose essential
characteristics are so distinct and well-marked that one is inclined
to credit all its members with one common ancestor.*
*It is important that the terms we shall successively
employ, adopting the classification of M. Emile Blanchard,--
"APIENS, APIDAE and APITAE,--should not be confounded. The
tribe of the Apiens comprises all families of bees. The
Apidae constitute the first of these families, and are
subdivided into three groups: the Meliponae, the Apitae, and
the Bombi (humble-bees). And, finally, the Apitae include
all the different varieties of our domestic bees.
The disciples of Darwin, Hermann Muller among others, consider a
little wild bee, the Prosopis, which is to be found all over the
universe, as the actual representative of the primitive bee whence
all have issued that are known to us to-day.
The unfortunate Prosopis stands more or less in the same relation to
the inhabitants of our hives as the cave-dwellers to the fortunate
who live in our great cities. You will probably more than once have
seen her fluttering about the bushes, in a deserted corner of your
garden, without realising that you were carelessly watching the
venerable ancestor to whom we probably owe most of our flowers and
fruits (for it is actually estimated that more than a hundred
thousand varieties of plants would disappear if the bees did not
visit them) and possibly even our civilisation, for in these
mysteries all things intertwine. She is nimble and attractive, the
variety most common in France being elegantly marked with white on a
black background. But this elegance hides an inconceivable poverty.
She leads a life of starvation. She is almost naked, whereas her
sisters are dad in a warm and sumptuous fleece. She has not, like
the Apidae, baskets to gather the pollen, nor, in their default, the
tuft of the Andrenae, nor the ventral brush of the Gastrilegidae.
Her tiny claws must laboriously gather the powder from the calices,
which powder she needs must swallow in order to take it back to her
lair. She has no implements other than her tongue, her mouth and her
claws; but her tongue is too short, her legs are feeble, and her
mandibles without strength. Unable to produce wax, bore holes
through wood, or dig in the earth, she contrives clumsy galleries in
the tender pith of dry berries; erects a few awkward cells, stores
these with a little food for the offspring she never will see; and
then, having accomplished this poor task of hers, that tends she
knows not whither and of whose aim we are no less ignorant, she goes
off and dies in a corner, as solitarily as she had lived.
We shall pass over many intermediary species, wherein we may see the
gradual lengthening of the tongue, enabling more nectar to be
extracted from the cups of corollas, and the dawning formation
and subsequent development of the apparatus for collecting
pollen,--hairs, tufts, brushes on the tibia, on the tarsus, and
abdomen,--as also claws and mandibles becoming stronger, useful
secretions being formed, and the genius that presides over the
construction of dwellings seeking and finding extraordinary
improvement in every direction. Such a study would need a whole
volume. I will merely outline a chapter of it, less than a chapter,
a page, which shall show how the hesitating endeavours of the will
to live and be happier result in the birth, development, and
affirmation of social intelligence.
We have seen the unfortunate Prosopis silently bearing her solitary
little destiny in the midst of this vast universe charged with
terrible forces. A certain number of her sisters, belonging to
species already more skilful and better supplied with utensils, such
as the well-clad Colletes, or the marvellous cutter of rose-leaves,
the Megachile Centuncularis, live in an isolation no less profound;
and if by chance some creature attach itself to them, and share
their dwelling, it will either be an enemy, or, more often, a
parasite.