THE KING’S BEE-MASTER
STUDENTS of old books on the honey-bee—and perhaps there has been more
written about bees during the last two thousand years than of all other
creatures put together—do not quite know what to make of Moses Rusden,
who was Charles the Second’s bee-master, and wrote his “Further Discovery
of Bees” in the year 1679. The wonder about Rusden is that obviously he
knew so much that was true about bee-life, and yet seems, of set purpose,
to have imparted so little. He was a shrewdly observant man, of lifelong
experience in his craft. His system of bee-keeping would not have
disgraced many an apiculturist of the present time, often yielding him a
honey harvest averaging sixty pounds to the hive, which is a result not
always achieved even by our foremost apiarian scientists. His hives were
fitted with glass windows, through which he was continually studying his
bees. He must have had endless opportunities of proving the fallacy and
folly of the ancient classic notions as to bee-life. And yet we find him
gravely upholding almost the entire framework of fantastic error, old
even in Pliny’s time; and speaking of the king-bee with his generals,
captains, and retinue, honey that was a dew divinely sent down from
heaven, the miraculous propagation of bee-kind from the flowers, and all
the other curious myths and fables handed down from writer to writer
since the very earliest days.
But, reading on in the little time-stained, worm-eaten book, it is not
very difficult to guess at last why Rusden adopted this attitude. He was
the King’s bee-master, and therefore a courtier first and a naturalist
afterwards. In the first flush of the Restoration, anyone who had
anything to say in support of the divine right of kings was certain to
catch the Royal eye. Rusden admits himself conversant with Butler’s
“Feminine Monarchie,” published some fifty years before, in which the
writer argues that the single great bee in a hive was really a female.
To a man of Rusden’s practical experience and deductive quality of mind,
this statement must have lead, and no doubt did lead, to all sorts of
speculations and discoveries. But with a ruler of Charles the Second’s
temperament, feminine monarchies were not to be thought of. Rusden saw
at once his restrictions and his peculiar opportunity, and wrote his book
on bees, which is really an ingenious attempt to show that the system of
a self-ruling commonwealth is a violation of nature, and that, whether
for bees or men, government under a king is the divinely ordained state.
Whether, however, Rusden was deliberately insincere, or actually
succeeded in blinding himself conveniently for his own purposes, it must
be admitted not only that he argued the case with singular adroitness,
but that never did facts adapt themselves so readily to either conscious
or unconscious misrepresentation. In the glass-windowed hives of the
Royal bee-house at Saint James’s, he was able to show the King a nation
of creatures evidently united under a common rule, labouring together in
harmony and producing works little short of miraculous to the mediæval
eye. He saw that these creatures were of two sorts, each going about its
duty after its kind, but that in each colony there was one bee, and only
one, which differed entirely from the rest. To this single large bee all
the others paid the greatest deference. It was cared for and nourished,
and attended assiduously in its progress over the combs. All the humanly
approved tokens of royalty were manifest about it. No wonder the King’s
bee-master was not slow in recognising that, in those troublous times, he
could do his patron no greater service than by pointing out to the
superstitious and ignorant multitude—still looking askance at the
restored monarchy—such indisputable evidence in nature of Charles’s
parallel right.
And perhaps nature has never been at such pains to conceal her true
processes from the vulgar eye as in this case of the honey-bee. If
Rusden ever suspected that the one large bee in each colony was really
the mother of all the rest, and had set himself to prove it, he would
have found the whole array of visible facts in opposition to him. If
ever a truth seemed established beyond all reasonable doubt, it was that
the ordinary male-and-female principle, pertaining throughout the rest of
creation, was abrogated in the single instance of the honey-bee. The
ancients explained this anomaly as a special gift from the gods, and the
bees were supposed to discover the germs of bee-life in certain kinds of
flowers and to bring them home to the cells for development. Rusden
improved upon this idea by assigning to his king-bee the duty of
fertilising these embryos when they were placed in the cells, for he
could not otherwise explain a fact of which he was perfectly well
aware—that the large bee travelled the combs unceasingly, thrusting its
body into each cell in turn. Rusden also held that the worker-bees were
females, but only—as Freemasons would say—in a speculative manner. They
neither laid eggs nor bore young. Their maternal duties consisted only
in gathering the essence of bee-life from the blossoms and nursing and
tending the young bees when they emerged from their cradle-cells. The
drones were a great difficulty to Rusden. To admit them to be males—as
some held even in his day—would have been against the declared object of
his book, as tending to entrench upon royal prerogatives. Luckily, this
truth was as easy of apparent refutation as all the rest. No one had
ever detected any traffic of the sexes amongst bees either in or out of
the hives; nor, indeed, is such detection possible. The fact that the
queen-bee has concourse with the drone only once in her whole life, and
that their meeting takes place in the upper air far out of reach of human
observation, is knowledge only of yesterday. In Rusden’s time such a
marvel was never even suspected. As the drones, therefore, were never
seen to approach the worker bees or to notice them in any way, and as
also young bees were bred in the hives during many months when no drones
existed at all, Rusden’s ingenuity was equal to the task of bringing them
into line with his theory.
If he had lived a few decades earlier, and it had been Cromwell, instead
of the heartless, middle-aged rake of a sovereign, whom he had to
propitiate, no doubt Rusden would have asked his public to swallow
Pliny’s whole apiarian philosophy at a gulp. Bee-life would then have
been held up as a foreshadowing of celestial conditions, and the facts
would have lent themselves to this view equally as well. But his task
was to represent the economy of the hive as a clear proof of divine
authority in kingship, and it must be conceded that, as far as knowledge
went in those days, he established his case.
His book was published under the ægis of the Royal Society, and “by his
Majestie’s especial Command,” which was less a testimony of the King’s
love for natural history than of his political astuteness. Apart,
however, from its peculiar mission, the book is interesting as a
sidelight on the old bee-masters and their ways. Probably it represents
very fairly the extent of knowledge at the time, which had evidently
advanced very little since the days of Virgil. Rusden taught, with the
ancients, that honey was a secretion from the stars, and that wax was
gathered from the flowers, as well as the generative matter before
mentioned. He had one theory which seems to have been essentially his
own. The little lumps of many-coloured pollen, which the worker-bees
fetch home so industriously in the breeding season, he held to be the
actual substance of the young bees to come, in an elementary state.
These, he tells us, were placed in the cells, having absorbed the
feminine virtues from their bearers on the way. The king-bee then
visited each in turn, vivifying them with his essence, after which they
had nothing to do but grow into perfect bees. He got over the difficulty
of the varying sexes of the bees bred in a hive by asserting that these
lumps of animable matter were created in the flowers, either female, or
neuter—as he called the drones—or royal, as the case might be. Having
denied the drones any part in the production of their species, or in
furnishing the needs of the hive, Rusden was hard put to it to find a use
for them in a system where it would have been _lèse-majesté_ to suppose
anything superfluous or amiss. He therefore hits upon an idea which,
curiously enough, embodies matter still under dispute at the present
time, although it is being slowly recognised as a truth. Rusden says the
use of the drones is to take the place of the other bees in the hive when
these are mostly away honey-gathering. Their great bodies act as so many
warming stoves, supplying the necessary heat to the hatching embryos and
the maturing stores of honey. It is well known that drones gather
together side by side, principally in the remoter parts of the hive,
often completely covering these outer combs. They seldom rouse from
their lethargy of repletion to take their daily flight until about
midday, when most of the ingathering work is over, and the hive is again
fairly populous with worker-bees. Probably, therefore, Rusden was quite
right in his theory, which, hundreds of years after, is only just
beginning to be accepted as a fact.