THE QUEEN BEE: IN ROMANCE AND REALITY
“QUEENS?” said the Bee-Master of Warrilow, as he filled his pipe with the
blackest and strongest tobacco I had ever set eyes on; “queens? There
are hundreds of hives here, as you can see; and there isn’t a queen in
any one of them.”
He drew at the pipe until he had coaxed it into full blast, and the smoke
went drifting idly away through the still April sunshine. We were in the
very midst of the bee-garden, sitting side by side on the honey-barrow
after a long morning’s work among the hives; and the old bee-man had
lapsed into his usual contemplative mood.
“’Tis a pretty idea,” he went on, “this of royalty, and a realm of
dutiful subjects, and all the rest of it, in bee-life. But experience in
apiculture, as with most things of this world, does away with a good many
fine and fanciful notions. Now, the mother-bee in a hive, whatever else
you might call her, is certainly not a queen, in the sense of ruling over
the other bees in the colony. The truth is she has little or nothing to
do with the direction of affairs. All the thinking and contriving is
done by the worker-bees. They have the whole management of the hive, and
simply look upon the queen as a much prized and carefully-guarded piece
of egg-laying machinery, to be made the most of as long as her usefulness
lasts, but to be thrown over and replaced by another the moment her
powers begin to flag.”
“No; there are no queens, properly so called, in bee-life,” he continued.
“All that belongs to the good old times when there were nothing but
straw-skeps, and ’twas well-nigh impossible to get at the rights of
anything; so the bee-keeper went on believing that honey was made out of
starshine, and young bees were bred from the juice of white honeysuckle,
which was all pretty enough in its way, even though it warn’t true. But
nowadays, when they make hives with comb-frames that can be lifted out
and looked at in the broad light of day, folk are beginning to understand
a power of things about bees that were dark mysteries only a while ago.”
He puffed at his pipe for a little in silence. Far away over the great
province of hives, the clock on the extracting-house pointed to half-past
twelve; and, true to their usual time, the home-staying bees—the
housekeepers and nurses and lately hatched young ones—were out for their
midday exercise. The foragers were going to and fro as thickly as ever
with their loads of pollen and water for the still cradled larvæ within;
but now round every hive a little cloud of bees hovered, filling the
sunshine with the drowsy music of their wings. The old bee-man took up
his theme again presently at the point he had broken it off.
“If,” said he, “you keep a fairly close watch on the progress of any one
particular hive, from the time the first eggs appear in the combs early
in January, ’tis very easy to see how the old false ideas got into
general use. At first glance a bee-colony looks very much like a
kingdom; and the single large bee, that all the others pay court to and
attend so carefully, seems very like a queen. Then, when you look a
little deeper and begin to understand more, appearances are still all in
favour of the old view of things. The mother-bee seems, on the face of
it, a miracle of intelligence and foresight. While, as far as you know,
all other creatures in the world bring forth their young of both sexes
haphazard, this one can lay male or female eggs apparently at will. You
watch her going from comb to comb, and the eggs she drops in the small
cells hatch out females, and those she puts in the larger ones are always
males, or drones. More than that: she seems always to know the exact
condition of the hive, and to be able to limit her egg-laying according
to its need, or otherwise, of population; for either you see her filling
only a few cells each day in a little patch of comb that can be covered
with the palm of your hand, or she goes to work on a gigantic scale, and,
in twenty-four hours, produces eggs that weigh more than twice as much as
her whole body.”
He got up now and began pacing to and fro, as was his custom when much in
earnest over his bee-talk.
“Then,” he went on, “to cap all, as the honey season draws on to its
height, you are forced presently to realise that the queen has conceived
and is carrying through a scheme for the good of her subjects that would
do credit to the wisest ruler ever born in human purple. Every day of
summer sunshine has brought thousands of young bees to life. The hive is
getting overcrowded. Sooner or later one of two things must
happen—either the increase of population must be checked, or a great
party must be formed to leave the old home and go out to establish
another one. Then it is that the mother-bee seems to prove beyond a
doubt her wisdom and queenliness. She decides for the emigration; but as
a leader must be found for the party, and none is at hand, she forms the
resolve to head it herself. From that moment a change comes over the
whole hive. Preparation for the coming event goes on fast and furiously,
and excitement increases day by day. But the queen seems to forget
nothing. A new ruler for the old realm must be provided to take her
place when she is gone for ever; and now you see a party of bees set to
work on something that fairly beggars curiosity. At first it looks
exactly like an acorn-cup in wax hanging from the under-edge of the comb.
Perhaps the next time you look the cup has grown to twice its original
size; and now you see it is half full of a glistening white jelly. The
next time, maybe, you open the hive, the acorn has been added to the cup;
the queen-cell is sealed over and finished, and about a week later there
comes out a full-grown queen bee, twice the size of the ordinary worker
and quite different in shape and often in colour too. But days before
the new ruler is ready the excitement in the hive has grown to
fever-pitch. If you come out then in the quiet of the night and put your
ear close to the hive, you will hear a shrill piping noise which the
ancient skeppists tell you is the old queen calling her subjects together
for the swarm on the morrow. And, sure enough, out she goes with half
the population of the hive in her train, to look for a new home; and in a
day or so the new queen comes out of her cell to take charge of the
colony.”
He paused to fill the old briar pipe again, lighting it with slow
deliberate puffs, and I could not help marking how nearly alike in colour
were the bowl and his rugged, sunburnt, clever face.
“But now, look you!” said he, suddenly levelling the pipe-stem like a
pistol at me to emphasise his words. “If the mother-bee really brought
all this about, queen would not be a good enough name for her. But the
truth is, throughout all the wonder-workings of the hive, the queen is
little more than an instrument, a kind of automaton, merely doing what
the workers compel her to do. They are the real queens in the hive, and
the mother-bee is the one and only subject. Did you ever think what a
queen-bee actually is, and how she comes to be there at all? The fact is
that the workers have made her for their own wise purposes, just as they
make the comb and the honey to store in it. The egg she is hatched from
is in no way different from any worker-egg. If you take one from a
queen-cell and put it in the ordinary comb, it will hatch out a common
female worker-bee: and an egg transferred from worker-comb to a
queen-cell becomes a full-grown queen. Thousands and thousands of
worker-eggs are laid in a hive during the season, and each of those could
be made into a queen if the workers chose. But the worker-egg is laid
into a small cell, and the larva is bred on a bare minimum of food, at
the least possible cost in time, trouble, and space to the hive; while,
when a new queen is wanted, a cell as big as your finger-top is built,
and the larva is stuffed like a prize-pig through all its five days of
active life, until, with unlimited food and time and room to grow in, it
comes out at last a perfect mother-bee.”
“But,” I asked him, “how is the population in the hive regulated, and how
can the apportionment of the sexes be brought about? If, as you say, the
queen does only what she is made to do by the workers, and that
unthinkingly and mechanically, you only increase the difficulty of the
problem.”
“As for increasing or restricting the number of eggs laid,” he said,
“that is only a question of food; and here you see how the workers
control the mother-bee entirely, and, through her, the whole condition of
the hive. When she is egg-laying they feed her from their own mouths
with special predigested food; and the more she gets of this, the more
eggs are laid. But when the season is done, and the need for a large
population over, this rich stimulating diet is kept from her. She then
must go to the honey-cells like the rest, or starve; and at once her
egg-laying powers begin to fall off. And it is in exactly the same
way—by their management of the queen—that the workers control the
proportion of the sexes in a hive. ’Tis more difficult to explain, but
here is about the rights of it. Directly the new-hatched queen-bee is
ready for work, she flies out to meet the drones; and one impregnation
lasts her whole life through. But the eggs themselves are not fertilised
until the very moment of laying, and then only in the case of those laid
in worker-comb: drone-eggs are never impregnated at all. Now, in all
likelihood, as the queen is being driven over the combs, it is the size
of the cell that determines whether the egg laid shall be male or female.
When the queen thrusts her long pointed body into the narrow worker-cell,
her position is a straight, upright one, and the egg cannot be laid
without passing over the impregnation-gland; but with the larger
drone-cell the queen has room to curve herself, which is the means, I
think, of the egg escaping without being fertilised. And so you see it
is only the female bee that has two parents; the drone has no father at
all.”