THE SONG OF THE HIVES
FROM the lane, where it dipped down between its rose-mantled hedges,
nothing of the bee-garden could be seen. The dense barricade of briar
and hawthorn hid all but the lichened roof of the ancient dwelling-house;
and strangers going by on their way to the village saw nothing of the
crowding hives, and marked little else than the usual busy murmur of
insect-life common to any sunny day in June.
But when they came out of the green tunnel of hedgerows into the open
fields beyond, chance wayfarers always stopped and looked about them
wonderingly, at length fixing a puzzled glance intently on the blue sky
itself. At this corner, and nowhere else, seemingly, the air was full of
a deep, reverberant music. A steady torrent of rich sound streamed by
overhead; and yet, to the untutored observer, the most diligent scrutiny
failed to reveal its origin. A few gnats harped in the sunbeams. Now
and again a bumble-bee struck a deep chord or two in the wayside herbage
underfoot. But this clear, strong voice from the skies was altogether
unexplainable. To human sight, at least, the blue air and sunshine held
nothing to account for it; and the stranger unversed in honey-bee lore,
after taking his fill of this melodious mystery, generally ended by
giving up the problem as insoluble, and passing on to his business or
pleasure in the little green-garlanded hamlet under the hill.
That the bees of a fairly large apiary should produce a considerable
volume of sound in their passage to and fro between the hives and the
honey-pastures is in no way remarkable. In the heyday of the year—the
brief six weeks’ honey-flow of the English summer—probably each normal
colony of bees would send out an army of foragers at least twenty
thousand strong. What really seems matter for wonder is the way in which
bees appear to concentrate their movements to certain well-defined tracks
in the atmosphere. They do not distribute themselves broadcast over the
intervening space, as they might be expected to do, but wonderfully keep
to certain definite restricted thoroughfares, no matter how near or how
remote their foraging grounds may be.
And this particular gap in the chain of hedgerows really marked the great
main highway for the bees between the hives and the clover-fields
silvering the whole wide stretch of hill and dale beyond. Every moment
had its winged thousands going and returning. At any time, if a fine net
could have been cast suddenly a few fathoms upward, it would have fallen
to earth black and heavy with bees; but the singing multitude went by at
so fast and furious a pace that, to the keenest sight, not one of the
eager crew was visible. Only the sound of their going was plain to all;
a mighty tenor note abroad in the sunshine, a thronging sustained melody
that never ceased all through the heat and burthen of the glittering
summer’s day.
When Shelley heard the “yellow bees in the ivy-bloom,” and he of Avonside
wrote of “singing masons building roofs of gold,” probably neither
thought of the humming of the hive-bee as anything more than an
ingredient in the general delightful country chorus, as distinct from the
less-inspiring labour-note of busy humanity in a town. With the single
exception, perhaps, of Wordsworth, poets, thinking most of their line,
commonly miss the subtler phases of wild life, such as the continually
changing emphasis and capricious variation in bird song, the real sound
made by growth, or the unceasing movement of things conventionally held
to be inert. And in the same way the endlessly varied song of the bees
has been epitomised by imaginative writers generally into a sound,
pleasantly arcadian enough, but little more suggestive of life and
meaning than the hum of telegraph wires in a breeze.
Yet there are few sounds in nature more bewilderingly complex than this.
For every season in the year the song of the hives has its own distinct
appropriate quality, and this, again, is constantly influenced by the
time of day, and even by the momentary aspect of the weather. A
bee-keeper of the old school—and he is sure to be the “character,” the
quaint original of a village—manages his hives as much by ear as by
sight. The general note of each hive reveals to him intuitively its
progress and condition. He seems to know what to expect on almost any
day in the year, so that if Rip van Winkle had been an apiarist the
nearest bee-garden would have been as sure a guide to him, in respect of
the time of year at least, as the sun’s declining arc in the heaven is to
the tired reapers in respect of the hour of day.
Most people—and with these must be included even lifelong
country-dwellers—are wont to regard the humming of the hive-bee as a
simple monotone, produced entirely by the rapid movement of the wings.
But this conception halts very far short of the actual truth. In
reality, the sound made by a honey-bee is threefold. It can consist
either of a single tone, a combination of two notes, or even a grand
triple chord, heard principally in moments of excitement, such as when a
swarming-party is on the wing, or in late autumn and early spring, when
civil war will often break out in an ill-managed apiary. The actual
buzzing sound is produced by the wings; the deeper musical tones by the
air alternately sucked in and driven out through the spiracles, which are
breathing-tubes ranged along each side of a bee’s body; while the shrill,
clarinet-like note comes from the true voice-apparatus itself. In
ordinary flight it is the wings and the respiration-tubes conjointly
which produce the steady volume of sound heard as the honey-makers stream
over the hedgetop towards the distant clover-fields; and this is the note
also that pervades the bee-garden through every sunny hour of the
working-day. The rich, soft murmur coming from the spiracles is probably
never heard except when the bee is flying, but both the true voice and
the whirring wing-melody are familiar as separate sounds to every
bee-keeper who studies his hives.
When the summer night has shut down warm and still over the red dusk of
evening, and the last airy loiterer is safely home from the fields, a
curious change comes to the bee-garden. The old analogy between a
concourse of hives and a human city is, at this season, utterly at fault.
Silence and rest after the day’s work may be the portion of the larger
community, but in the time of the great honey-flow there is neither rest
nor slumber for the bees. A fury of labour possesses them, one and all;
and darkness does not remit, but merely transposes the scene of their
activity. Coming out into the garden at this hour for a quiet pipe among
the hives—an old and favourite habit with most bee-keeping veterans—the
new spirit abroad is at once manifest. The sulky, fragrant darkness is
silent, quiet with the influence of the starshine overhead; but the very
earth of the footway seems to vibrate with the imprisoned energy of the
hives. This is the time when the low, rustling roar of wing-music can
best be heard, and one of the most wonderful phases of bee-life studied.
The problem of the ventilation of human hives is attacked commonly on one
main principle—unstinted ingress for fresh air and a like abundant means
of outward passage for the bad. But, if the bees are to be credited,
modern sanitary scientists are trimming altogether on the wrong tack. A
colony of bees will allow one aperture, and one alone, in the hive, to
serve all and every purpose. If the enterprising novice in beemanship
gimlets a row of ventilation-holes in the back of his hive—an idea that
occurs to most tyros in apiculture—the bees will infallibly seal them all
up again before morning. They work on entirely different principles,
impelled by their especial needs. The economy of the hive requires the
temperature to be absolutely and immediately within the control of the
bees, and this is only possible when the ventilatory system is entirely
mechanical. The evaporation of moisture from the new-gathered nectar,
and the hatching of the young brood, necessitate an amount of heat much
less than that required for wax-generating; as soon as the wax-makers
begin to cluster the temperature of the hive is at once increased. But
if a current of air were continually passing through the hive these
necessary heat variations would be difficult to manage, even supposing
them possible at all; so the bees have invented their unique system of a
single passageway, combined with an ingenious and complicated process of
fanning, by which the fresh air is sucked in at one side of the entrance
and the foul air drawn out at the other, the atmosphere of the hive being
thus maintained in a constant state of circulation, fast or slow,
according to the temperature needed.
In the hot summer weather these fanning-parties are at work continuously,
being relieved by others at intervals of a few minutes throughout the
day. But at night, when the whole population of the hive is at home, the
need for ventilation is greatly augmented, and then the open lines of
fanners often stretch out over the alighting-board six or seven ranks
deep, making an harmonious uproar that, on a still night, will travel
incredible distances.
This tense, forceful labour-song of the bee-garden, heard unremittingly
throughout the hours of darkness, is always pleasant, often indescribably
soothing in its effect. But it is essentially a communal note,
expressive only of the well or ill being of the hive at large. The
individuality, even personal idiosyncrasy, which undoubtedly exists among
bees, finds its utterance mainly through the true voice-organ. You
cannot stand for long, here, in the quiet of the summer night, listening
to one particular hive, without sooner or later becoming aware of other
sounds, in addition to the general musical hubbub of the fanning army.
It is evident that a nervous, high-strung spirit pervades the colony,
especially during the season of the great honey-flow. Their common
agreement on all main issues does not prevent these “virgin daughters of
toil” from engaging in sundry sharp altercations and mutual hustlings in
the course of their business; and, at times of threatening weather, a
tendency towards snappishness, and a whimsical perversity
characteristically feminine, seem to make up the prevailing tone. It is
during these chance forays that the true voice of the honey-bee, apart
from the sounds made by wing and spiracle, can best be differentiated.