SUMMER LIFE IN A BEE-HIVE
IF you go to the bee-garden early of a fine summer’s morning you will be
struck by the singular quiet of the place. All the woods and hedgerows
are ringing with busy life. The rooks are cawing homeward with already
hours of strenuous work behind them. The cattle in the meadows are well
through their first cud. But as yet the bee-city is as still as the
sleeping village around it. Now and again a bee drops down from the sky
on a deserted hive-threshold with sleepy hum, and runs past the guards at
the gate. But these are bees that have wandered too far afield
overnight, tempted by the sunny warmth of the evening. The dusk has
caught them, and obliterated their flying-marks. They have perforce
camped out under some broad leaf, to be wakened by the earliest light of
morning and hurry home with their belated loads.
The sun is well up over the hillbrow before the visible life of the
bee-garden begins to rouse in earnest. The water-seekers are the first
to appear. Every hive has its traditional dipping-place, generally the
oozy margin of some neighbouring pond, where the house-martins have been
wheeling and crying since the first grey of dawn. Now the bees’ clear
undertone begins to mingle with the chippering chorus. In a little while
there is a thin straight line of humming music stretched between the
hives and the pond: it could not be straighter if a surveyor had made it
with his level. Again a little while, and this long searchlight of
melody thrown out by the bee-garden veers to the north. You may track it
straight over copse and meadow, seeing not a bee overhead, but guided
unerringly by the arrow-flight of music, until, on the far hillside, it
is lost in a perfect roar of sound. Here the white-clover is in almost
full blossom again: in southern England at least it is always the second
crop of clover that yields the most plentiful harvest to the hives.
It must be a disturbing thing to those kindergarten moralists who hold
the bee up to youth for an example of industry and prudence to learn that
she is by no means an early riser; though, at this time of year, she is
undoubtedly both wealthy and wise. For it is her very wisdom that now
makes her a lie-abed. When the iron is hot, she will not be slow in
striking. But it is nectar, not dewdrops, from which she makes her
honey. Very wisely she waits until the sun has drunk up the dew from the
clover-bells, and then she hurries forth to garner their undiluted
sweets. Even then, perhaps, three-fourths of her burden will be carried
uselessly. In the brewing-vats of the hive the nectar must stand and
steam until three parts of its original bulk has evaporated, and its
sugar has been inverted into grape-sugar. Then it is honey, but not
before. When we see the fanning-army at work by the entrance of a hive,
it is not alone an undoubted passion for pure air that moves the bees to
such ingenious activity. In the height of the honey season many pints of
vaporised liquid must be given off by the maturing stores in the course
of a day and night, and all this water must be got rid of. Herein is
shown the wisdom of the bee-master who makes the walls of his hives of a
material that is a bad conductor of heat. It is a first necessity of
health to the bees that the moisture in the air, which they are
incessantly fanning out at this time, should not condense until it is
safely wafted from the hive. A cold-walled hive can easily become a
quagmire.
The bee-garden is quiet now in the sweet virgin light of the summer’s
morning; but the thought of it as containing so many houses of sleep,
true of the village with its thatched human dwellings, could not well be
farther from the truth in regard to the village of hives. There is
little sleep in a bee-hive in summer. Of any common period of rest, of
any quiet night when all but the sentinels at the gate are slumbering, of
any general time of relaxation, there is absolutely none. Each
individual bee—forager or nurse, comb-builder or storekeeper—works until
she can work no more, and then stops by the way, or crawls into the
nearest empty cell for a brief siesta. But the life of the hive itself
never halts, never wavers in summertime, night or day. Go to it morning,
noon, or night in the hot July season, and you will always find it
driving onward unremittingly. The crowd is surging to and fro. There is
ever the busy deep labour-note. Its people are building, brewing,
wax-making, scavenging, wet-nursing, being born and dying: it is all
going on without pause or break inside those four reverberating walls,
while you stand without in the dew-soaked grass and level sunbeams
wondering how it is that all the world can be at full flood-tide of merry
life and music while these mysterious hive people give scarce a sign.
It is at night chiefly that the combs are built. The wax, that is a
secretion from the bees’ own bodies, will generate only under great heat,
and the temperature of the hive is naturally greatest when all the family
is at home. In the night also such works as transferring a large mass of
honey from one comb to another are undertaken. It is curious to note
that at night time the drones get together in the remotest parts of the
hive, apparently to keep up the heat in these distant quarters, which are
away from the main cluster of worker-bees. There is hardly another thing
in creation, perhaps, with a worse name than the drone-bee. But like all
bad things he is not so bad as he is represented. Apart from his main
and obvious use, the drone fulfils at least one very important office.
His habit is not to leave his snug corner until close upon midday. Thus,
when every able-bodied worker bee is out foraging, the temperature of the
hive is sustained by the presence of the drones, and the young bee-brood
is in no danger of chilling.
Though the supreme direction of all affairs in a bee-hive falls to the
lot of the worker-bees, the queen-mother is second to none in industry.
At this time of year she goes about her task with a dogged patience and
assiduity pathetic to witness. She may have to supply from two thousand
to three thousand brood-cells with eggs in the course of a single day,
and she is for ever wandering through the crowded corridors of the hive
looking for empty cradles. The old bee-masters believed that the queen
was always accompanied in these unending promenades by exactly a dozen
bees, whom they called the Twelve Apostles. It is true that whenever the
queen stops in her march she is immediately surrounded by a number of
bees, who form themselves into a ring, keeping their heads ceremoniously
towards her. But close observation reveals the fact that the queen-bee
is never followed about by a permanent retinue. When she moves to go on,
the ring breaks and disperses before her; but the bees who gather round
her on her next halt are those who happen to occupy the space of comb she
has then reached.
The truth seems to be that she is passed from “hand to hand” over the
combs of the brood-nest, and is stopped wherever a cell requires
replenishing. Each bee that she encounters on her path turns front and
touches her gently with her antenna. The queen constantly returns these
salutes as she moves, and it looks exactly as if she were going the
rounds of her domain and collecting information. Often she is stopped by
half a dozen bees in a solid phalanx, and carefully headed off in a new
direction. She looks into every cell as she goes, and when she has
lowered her body into a cell, the Apostles instantly gather about her,
with strokings and caresses. But their number is seldom twelve. It
varies according to the bulk and length of the queen herself, and is more
often sixteen than a dozen.