and one of them is to bring her into the hive enclosed in a little cage
with iron wires, which is hung between two combs. The door of the cage
is made of wax and honey; the bees, after their first display of fury,
will gnaw at the wax and honey, thus freeing the prisoner, who will then
sometimes be allowed to go unharmed, and be subsequently accepted. There
is another way, too, that is used by a bee-master at Rottingdean, who
imagined that the unfavorable reception of the new queen might in some
degree be caused by her own curious behavior. No sooner will she have
been put into the hive than she will rush wildly to and fro, vainly
trying to hide in one place or another, and generally doing all she can
to make the bees suspicious. Mr. Simmins, the bee-master in question,
shuts the queen up for half an hour without any food before putting her
into the hive. He then carefully raises a corner of the cover, and
drops her on to the top of one of the combs. She seems overjoyed at
finding the bees around her, and as she is starving she gladly accepts
the food that they offer her. The workers, deceived by her manner, seem
to believe that she actually is their old queen who has come back to
them, and welcome her joyfully. In this case, therefore, it would seem
that Huber, and the other experts who declare that the bees can always
recognize their own queen, are not entirely right.
And there is also this to be said about the affection the bees have for
their queen. That affection is real, and certainly exists; but it is
certain also that it does not last very long. If you were to put back
into the hive a queen who had been away for several days, her daughters
would receive her so badly that you would have to snatch her up very
quickly, and take her away. The explanation is that the bees will have
made their arrangements to replace her, and will have turned a dozen
workers'cells into royal cradles, thus providing for a new queen and
rendering the future safe. They will therefore have nothing more to do
with the old one.
The future is the bees' one consideration, and they sacrifice everything
to it. As a curious instance, one may mention the way in which they will
deal with a mouse, or a slug perhaps, that shall have managed to get
into the hive. They will very soon kill the intruder, but then have to
consider how they will get rid of the body. If they are unable to drag
it out of the hive or tear it to pieces, they will build a perfect waxen
tomb round it, which will tower strangely above the ordinary monuments
of the city. In one of my hives last year I found three such tombs side
by side; they had been made with party-walls, like the cells of the
comb, so that no wax should be wasted. The careful grave-diggers had
raised these tombs over the remains of three snails that a child had
dropped into the hive. Generally, in the case of snails, the bees will
be satisfied to seal the opening of the shell with wax. But here it
seemed that the shells were broken, and the bees had therefore thought
it wiser to bury the entire snail; and so that the entrance-hall should
not be blocked, they had made a number of galleries, wide enough for the
male bees, which are almost twice as big as the workers, to pass
through. In districts where the hideous death's-head moth abounds, the
bees erect little columns of wax at the entrance of the hive, and place
them so closely together that the night-thief cannot pass through.
And now to return to our swarming hive, where the bees have already
given the signal for flight. And at once, as though with one sudden
impulse, every gate in the city is flung open wide; and the black throng
issues, or rather pours forth, in a double or treble jet, in a
throbbing, quivering stream, that quickly divides and melts into space,
where the thousands of beating wings weave a tissue humming with sound.
And this for some moments will hover above the hive, rustling like
gossamer silk; then, like a veil of gladness, all stirring and
quivering, it floats to and fro, from the flowers up to the sky. The
radiant mantle will gather together its four sunlit corners; and, like
the fairy carpet, will fly across space, steering its straight, direct
course to the willow, the pear-tree or lime on which the queen will have
settled. Around her each wave comes to rest, as though on a golden nail,
and from it there hangs the tissue of pearls and of golden wings.
And then there is silence once more; and, in an instant, this mighty
tumult, this bewildering golden hail that streamed upon every object
near, becomes nothing more than a cluster of inoffensive and harmless
bees, that wait patiently, in thousands of little motionless groups
hanging down from the branch of a tree, for the scouts to return who
have gone in search of a place of shelter.
This is the first stage of what is known as the "primary swarm," at
whose head the old queen is always to be found. The bees will usually
settle on the shrub or the tree that is nearest the hive; for the
queen, who has spent all her life in the dark and has almost forgotten
the use of her wings, is afraid to venture too far.
The bee-keeper waits till the great mass of bees is all gathered
together; then, having covered his head with a large straw hat (for the
most inoffensive bee will think it is caught in a trap if entangled in
hair, and will at once use its sting) but, if he be experienced, wearing
neither mask nor veil--having taken the precaution only of plunging his
arms in cold water up to the elbow--he proceeds to gather the swarm by
vigorously shaking, over an inverted hive, the bough from which the bees
are hanging. Into this hive the cluster will fall just like an over-ripe
fruit. Or, if the branch be too thick, he can plunge a spoon into the
mass, and ladle it out, placing the living spoonfuls wherever it pleases
him, as though they were grains of corn. He need have no fear of the
bees that are buzzing around him, and settling on his face and hands;
and he knows that the swarm will not divide, or grow fierce, will not
scatter, or try to escape. This is a day when these strange workers seem
to make holiday, and to be full of a faith and a confidence that nothing
can shake. They have given up the treasure which they used to guard so
preciously; they no longer have enemies. They are harmless because they
are happy; though why they are happy we know not, unless it be because
they are doing what they feel it is right to do.
Where the queen has alighted the swarm will remain; and if she goes into
the hive, the long black files of the bees will closely follow, as soon
as the news shall reach them. Most of them will go eagerly in; but many
will stay for an instant on the threshold of the new home, and there
form themselves into solemn, ceremonious circles, which is their method
of celebrating happy events. "They are beating to arms," the French
peasants say. The new home will at once be adopted, and its furthest
corners explored. Its position, its shape, its color, are taken note of
and never forgotten by these thousands of eager and faithful little
memories, which have also duly recorded the neighboring landmarks; the
new city is founded and the thought of it fills the mind and the heart
of all its inhabitants; the walls resound with the song that proclaims
the royal presence; and work begins.
But if the swarm be not gathered by man, its history will not end here.
It will cling to the branch of the tree till the scouts return who have
been flying in every direction looking for a new home. They will come
back one by one, and give an account of their mission. The report of
each scout will probably be very carefully considered. One of them,
perhaps, will speak favorably of some hollow tree it has seen; another
has something to say about a crack in a ruined wall, a hole in a grotto,
or an abandoned burrow. Sometimes the assembly will stop and weigh
matters over till the next morning; but at last the choice is made and
agreed to by all. At a given moment the entire mass stirs, divides and
sets forth; and then, in one sustained and impetuous flight that this
time knows no obstacle, it steers its straight course, over hedges and
cornfields, over haystack and lake, over river and village, to its fixed
and always far-away goal. It is rarely indeed that this second stage
can be followed by man. The swarm returns to nature; and we know not
what becomes of it.
III
THE FOUNDATION OF THE CITY
The bee-keeper has gathered the swarm into his hive; let us now see what
they will do. And, first of all, let us not be unmindful of the
sacrifice that these fifty thousand workers have made, who, as Ronsard
says "In a little body bear so brave a heart," and let us, yet again,
admire the courage with which they begin their life anew in the desert
into which they have fallen. They have forgotten the wealth and
magnificence of their native city; they are indifferent to all they have
left behind. They give not a thought to the vast store of pollen that
they had collected, to the 120 pounds of honey, a quantity, let it be
remembered, which is more than twelve times the weight of all the bees
in the hive put together, and close on 600,000 times that of the single
bee. Or you might say that to us it would mean something like 42,000
tons of provisions, a great fleet laden with nourishment more precious
than any known to us; for to the bee honey is a kind of liquid life,
which it absorbs with almost no waste whatever.
Here, in the new abode, there is nothing; not a drop of honey, not a
morsel of wax; there is nothing to begin on, there is nothing to serve
as a starting-point. There is only the dreary emptiness of an enormous
building with its bare sides and roof. The smooth and rounded walls
enclose only darkness; under the lofty arch is a mere void. But useless
regrets are unknown to the bee; at any rate, they are not allowed to
interfere with work. And instead of being depressed or moping in a
corner, the bee sets to at once, and more energetically than ever.
Immediately, and without the smallest delay, the tangled mass divides,
splits up and forms itself into groups. Most of these will proceed,
marching abreast in regular columns, like regiments obeying the word of
command, and will begin to climb the steep walls of the hive. The first
bees to reach the dome will cling to it with the claws of their front
legs; those behind will hang on to the ones in front of them, and the
next the same, and so on to the end, till long chains have been made
that serve as a sort of bridge for the crowd which is ever mounting and
mounting. And, by slow degrees, these chains, as the number of bees
which form them becomes greater and greater, become a kind of dense,
three-cornered curtain. When the the last of the bees has joined itself
to this curtain that hangs in the darkness, all movement ceases in the
hive; and for long hours this strange cluster will wait, in a stillness
so complete as to be almost uncanny, for the mystery of wax to appear.
In the meantime, the rest of the bees--those whose business it was to
remain below in the hive--have paid not the smallest attention to the
others who were forming the curtain, and have made no effort whatever to
add themselves to the number. They have been told off to inspect the
hive, and to do what is immediately necessary. They start sweeping the
floor, and most carefully remove, one by one, every twig, grain of sand,
and dead leaf. This satisfactorily accomplished, they will most
thoroughly examine and test the floor of the new dwelling. They will
fill up every crack and crevice with a kind of raw wax; they will start
varnishing the walls, from the top to the bottom. A certain number of
guards will be sent to the gate, to take up their post there; and very
soon a detachment of workers will go forth to the fields, whence they
will come back with their store of pollen.
Before we raise the folds of the mysterious curtain, let us try to form
some idea of the skill and industry shown by the bees in fitting up the
new hive to serve their purposes. Within the walls there is merely a
desert; they must plan out their city, decide where the dwellings shall
be; and these must be built as quickly as possible, for the queen is
ready to begin to lay her eggs. They must consider the ventilation of
these dwellings, and these, too, must be strong and substantial.
Different buildings will be wanted for the different kinds of food that
are to be stored in them; also it is important that they should be
handily placed, so that there shall be no difficulty in finding them;
and passages and streets must be contrived between the cells and
store-houses. And there are many other problems besides, too many indeed
to relate, but they have all to be dealt with.
Bee-keepers provide different kinds of hives for the bees, ranging from
the hollow tree, or the earthenware pot, or the familiar bell-shaped
dome of straw which we find in our farmers' kitchen-gardens or under
their windows, hidden away between masses of sunflowers, phlox and
hollyhock, to what may be called the model factory, which is, as it
were, the last word of man's ingenuity as applied to the bee. It is a
building that will hold more than three hundred pounds of honey, having
three or four layers of combs set in a frame which makes it easy to
remove or handle the combs and take out the honey; after which, the
combs can be put back in their place like a book that we return to the
shelf. Now let us imagine that one fine day an obedient swarm of bees is
lodged in one of these hives. The little insects are expected to be able
to find their way about, to make their home there, to accept all these
strange things as natural. They have to make up their minds where the
winter storehouses shall be, and where the brood-cells; and these last
must not be too high or too low, neither too near to or far from the
entrance gate. The swarm may very likely just have come from the trunk
of a fallen tree, in which there was one long, narrow gallery; it finds
itself now in a tower-shaped building, whose ceiling is lost in the
gloom. And in the midst of this building is a confused and bewildering
network of frames and scaffolding, the like of which the bee never has
seen; and all around it are puzzling signs of the impertinent
interference of man.
But all this makes no difference to the bee; and no case has ever been
known of a swarm refusing to do its duty, or of allowing the strangeness
of its surroundings to discourage it--except only if the new home should
be too much exposed to the weather, or have an offensive smell. And even
then they will not give way to despair; they will promptly abandon the
place, fly away and seek better fortune a little further off.
But if no objection of this kind offers itself in a huge factory of this
kind, the bees will calmly go their own way, paying no heed whatever to
man's desires or intentions; the frames seem to them of use for their
combs, they will readily accept them. This will be more particularly the
case if the bee-keeper has artfully surrounded the upper layers of the
comb with a little strip of wax; the bees will pick out the wax, and go
on with the comb. If this should be covered all over with leaves of
foundation-wax, the bees will often be content to deepen and lengthen
the cells that have been traced out in the leaves, but will be careful
to alter the position of the cells should these not form an absolutely
straight line. And thus, in the space of a week, they will be in
possession of a city as comfortable and well-built as the one they have
left; whereas, in the ordinary way, if all the work had had to be done
by them, it would have taken them two or three months to erect the
buildings and storehouses out of their own shining wax.
Sir John Lubbock, who has written many interesting books on ants, bees,
and wasps, does not believe that the bee has any real intelligence of
its own, once it departs from what it has always been accustomed to do.
And as a proof of this he mentions an experiment that any one can try
for himself. If you put half a dozen bees, and the same number of flies
into a bottle, then place the bottle on the table with its foot to the
window, you will find that the bees will be quite unable to find their
way out, and will go on flinging themselves against the glass, till they
die of fatigue and hunger; while the flies will all have escaped, in
less than two minutes, through the open neck of the bottle. Sir John
Lubbock concludes from this that the bee cannot reason at all, and that
the fly shows more ingenuity in getting out of a difficulty. It is not
quite sure, however, that this conclusion is the right one. If you take
up the bottle and turn it round and round, holding now the neck and now
the foot to the window, you will find that the bees will turn with it,
so as always to face the light. It is their love of the light, it is
actually because of their intelligence, that they come to grief in this
experiment. They feel convinced that the escape from every prison must
be there where the light shines clearest. To them glass is a mystery
which they have never met with in nature; they cannot understand why
they are unable to pass through it, and convinced that there must be a
way, they persevere to the end; in fact, it is because of their
intelligence that they make these unhappy efforts to discover the
secret. The feather-brained flies, on the other hand, to whom the
mystery of glass means nothing and who possess no power of thought
whatever, merely flutter wildly hither and thither, and end by rushing
against the friendly opening that sets them free.
As another instance of the bees' lack of intelligence, Sir John Lubbock
quotes a passage from a book written by a great American bee-keeper, Mr.
Langstroth: "As the fly has to feed on many substances in which it might
easily be drowned, it has learned to be very prudent, and alights
carefully on the edge of a vessel containing liquid food; the bee, on
the other hand, plunges in headlong, and very quickly perishes. The sad
fate of their companions does not hinder others from madly rushing in in
their turn, to share the same miserable end. No one can understand the
extent of their folly till he has seen a confectioner's shop which has
been besieged by a crowd of hungry bees. I have known thousands to be
strained out from a vat of sirup in which they had been drowned;
thousands more kept on plunging into the boiling sweets; the floors were
covered and the windows completely darkened with bees, some crawling,
others flying, and some so bedaubed that they could neither fly nor
crawl--not one bee in ten able to carry home its ill-gotten spoil, and
yet the air filled with new hosts of thoughtless comers!"
It will not do, however, to condemn the bees too hastily; there is
something to be said on their side. They are accustomed to live in the
midst of nature, which has her own regular laws; and the ways of man are
strange and bewildering to them. In the forest, in their ordinary life,
the madness which Langstroth describes might have come over them if
some accident suddenly had destroyed a hive full of honey; but in that
case there would have been no fatal glass, no boiling sugar or cloying
sirup; there would have been no death or danger other than that to which
every animal is exposed while seeking its food. And let us remember too
that it was not mere greed, not the bees' own hunger, that caused them
to rush so wildly into the boiling vat. It was not for themselves that
they plunged into the deadly sugar; they can always feast on honey at
home, if they want to. The first thing the bee does when it returns to
the hive is to add the honey which it has gathered to the general store;
thirty times in an hour perhaps it will bring its offering to the
marvelous treasure-house. Their labors, therefore, their eagerness, have
no selfish motive; they have one desire, and one only, to increase the
wealth in the home of their sisters, which is also the home of the
future.
However, the whole truth must be told. Their industry is beyond all
praise; their methods, their sacrifice of self, arouse all our
admiration; but there is one thing that shocks us somewhat, and that is
the indifference with which they regard the misfortunes or death of
their comrades. The bee appears to possess two sides to her nature; in
the hive, in their home, they all help and care for each other; the
union between them, the fellowship, is very close and very true. A
thousand bees will sacrifice themselves to avenge an injury done by a
stranger to one of their sisters. But outside the hive, away from the
home, all this changes; they no longer appear to know one another. If a
piece of honeycomb were placed a few steps away from their dwelling, and
out of the crowd of bees that would flock to it you were to crush or
injure twenty or thirty, the others who had not been attacked would not
even turn their head. That strange tongue of theirs, curved like some
Chinese weapon, would quietly go on licking up the fluid that they
regard as more precious than life, and they would pay no heed whatever
to the agony, the cries of distress, of their sisters. And when they
have sucked the comb dry, they will be so anxious that not one drop
shall be lost, that they will even climb over the dead and the dying to
lick up the honey these hold in their jaws, and not one sound and
unharmed bee will make the slightest effort to help or relieve the
victims. The thought that they themselves run any danger does not
disturb them; they give no thought to the death that may perhaps await
them too.
But the fact is that the bees do not know the meaning of fear, and smoke
is the one thing in the world that they are afraid of. When they are out
of the hive, they are curiously inoffensive. They will avoid anything
that comes in their way, they will appear not to notice it, provided
always that it does not venture too near. This indulgence, however, this
meekness, hides a heart that is very sure of itself, very confident,
very reliant. No threat will induce the bee to alter her course; she
will never attempt to escape. Inside the hive, any danger, whatever it
be, will at once be boldly faced. Should any living creature, be it ant
or bear or man, venture to attack the sacred dwelling, every bee will
spring up and defend the home with passionate fury.
But we must frankly admit that they show no fellowship outside the hive,
and no sympathy, as we understand the word, within it. On the other
hand, nowhere in the world shall we discover a more perfect organization
of work for the benefit of all, a more amazing devotion to the coming
generation. It may be, perhaps, that this very devotion may have caused
them to ignore everything else. All their love goes to what lies ahead
of them; we give ours to what is around us. And are we so sure that, in
our own lives, there are not many things that we do that would seem
heartless and cruel to some being who might be watching us as closely as
we watch the bees?
Let us now see what means the bees have of communicating with each
other. Such means must obviously exist, for it would not be possible
for the work of so large a city, work which is so varied and so
perfectly organized, to be carried on without them. They must have some
method of communication, either by sounds or by some language of touch.
This strange sense may perhaps lie in the antennæ, which are little
horns, or feelers, containing, in the case of the workers, 12,000
delicate hairs and 5,000 "smell hollows"; with these antennæ they seem
to question and understand the darkness.
It is evidently not only in their work that the bees are able to
communicate with each other, for we know that any news, good or bad, any
sudden event, will at once be noised about in the hive; the loss or
return of the queen, for instance, the entrance of an enemy, the
intrusion of a strange queen, or the discovery of treasure. And each
separate incident produces such a different emotion among them, the
sounds they make are so essentially varied, that the experienced
bee-keeper, listening to the murmur that arises from the hive, can at
once and without any difficulty tell what it is that disturbs the
multitude that are moving restlessly to and fro in their city.