This page contains affiliate links. As Amazon Associates we earn from qualifying purchases.
Language:
Form:
Genre:
Published:
  • 1901
Edition:
Collection:
Tags:
Buy it on Amazon Listen via Audible FREE Audible 30 days

tower-shaped edifice, whose roof is lost in gloom. Or, to take a case that is more usual, perhaps, and one that will give some idea of the surprise habitually in store for the bees: after having lived for centuries past beneath the straw dome of our village hives, they are suddenly transplanted to a species of mighty cupboard, or chest, three or four times as large as the place of their birth; and installed in the midst of a confused scaffolding of superposed frames, some running parallel to the entrance and some perpendicular; the whole forming a bewildering network that obscures the surfaces of their dwelling.

And yet, for all this, there exists not a single instance of a swarm refusing its duty, or allowing itself to be baffled or discouraged by the strangeness of its surroundings, except only in the case of the new dwelling being absolutely uninhabitable, or impregnated with evil odours. And even then the bees will not be disheartened or bewildered; even then they will not abandon their mission. The swarm will simply forsake the inhospitable abode, to seek better fortune some little distance away. And similarly it can never be said of them that they can be induced to undertake any illogical or foolish task. Their common-sense has never been known to fail them; they have never, at a loss for definite decision, erected at haphazard structures of a wild or heterogeneous nature. Though you place the swarm in a sphere, a cube, or a pyramid, in an oval or polygonal basket, you will find, on visiting the bees a few days later, that if this strange assembly of little independent intellects has accepted the new abode, they will at once, and unhesitatingly and unanimously have known how to select the most favourable, often humanly speaking the only possible spot in this absurd habitation, in pursuance of a method whose principles may appear inflexible, but whose results are strikingly vivid.

When installed in one of the huge factories, bristling with frames, that we mentioned just now, these frames will interest them only to the extent in which they provide them with a basis or point of departure for their combs; and they very naturally pay not the slightest heed to the desires or intentions of man. But if the apiarist have taken the precaution of surrounding the upper lath of some of these frames with a narrow fillet of wax, they will be quick to perceive the advantage this tempting offer presents, and will carefully extract the fillet, using their own wax as solder, and will prolong the comb in accordance with the indicated plan. Similarly–and the case is frequent in modern apiculture–if all the frames of the hive into which the bees have been gathered be covered from top to bottom with leaves of foundation-wax, they will not waste time in erecting buildings across or beside these, or in producing useless wax, but, finding that the work is already half finished, they will be satisfied to deepen and lengthen each of the cells designed in the leaf, carefully rectifying these where there is the slightest deviation from the strictest vertical. Proceeding in this fashion, therefore, they will possess in a week a city as luxurious and well-constructed as the one they have quitted; whereas, had they been thrown on their own resources, it would have taken them two or three months to construct so great a profusion of dwellings and storehouses of shining wax.

[43]

This power of appropriation may well be considered to overstep the limit of instinct; and indeed there can be nothing more arbitrary than the distinction we draw between instinct and intelligence properly so-called. Sir John Lubbock, whose observations on ants, bees, and wasps are so interesting and so personal, is reluctant to credit the bee, from the moment it forsakes the routine of its habitual labour, with any power of discernment or reasoning. This attitude of his may be due in some measure to an unconscious bias in favour of the ants, whose ways he has more specially noted; for the entomologist is always inclined to regard that insect as the more intelligent to which he has more particularly devoted himself, and we have to be on our guard against this little personal predilection. As a proof of his theory, Sir John cites as an instance an experiment within the reach of all. If you place in a bottle half a dozen bees and the same number of flies, and lay the bottle down horizontally, with its base to the window, you will find that the bees will persist, till they die of exhaustion or hunger, in their endeavour to discover an issue through the glass; while the flies, in less than two minutes, will all have sallied forth through the neck on the opposite side. From this Sir John Lubbock concludes that the intelligence of the bee is exceedingly limited, and that the fly shows far greater skill in extricating itself from a difficulty, and finding its way. This conclusion, however, would not seem altogether flawless. Turn the transparent sphere twenty times, if you will, holding now the base, now the neck, to the window, and you will find that the bees will turn twenty times with it, so as always to face the light. It is their love of the light, it is their very intelligence, that is their undoing in this experiment of the English savant. They evidently imagine that the issue from every prison must be there where the light shines clearest; and they act in accordance, and persist in too logical action. To them glass is a supernatural mystery they never have met with in nature; they have had no experience of this suddenly impenetrable atmosphere; and, the greater their intelligence, the more inadmissible, more incomprehensible, will the strange obstacle appear. Whereas the featherbrained flies, careless of logic as of the enigma of crystal, disregarding the call of the light, flutter wildly hither and thither, and, meeting here the good fortune that often waits on the simple, who find salvation there where the wiser will perish, necessarily end by discovering the friendly opening that restores their liberty to them.

The same naturalist cites yet another proof of the bees’ lack of intelligence, and discovers it in the following quotation from the great American apiarist, the venerable and paternal Langstroth:–

“As the fly was not intended to banquet on blossoms, but on substances in which it might easily be drowned, it cautiously alights on the edge of any vessel containing liquid food, and warily helps itself; while the poor bee, plunging in headlong, speedily perishes. The sad fate of their unfortunate companions does not in the least deter others who approach the tempting lure from madly alighting on the bodies of the dying and the dead, to share the same miserable end. No one can understand the extent of their infatuation until he has seen a confectioner’s shop assailed by myriads of hungry bees. I have seen thousands strained out from the syrups in which they had perished; thousands more alighting even on the boiling sweets; the floors covered and windows darkened with bees, some crawling, others flying, and others still so completely besmeared as to be able neither to crawl nor to fly–not one in ten able to carry home its ill-gotten spoils, and yet the air filled with new hosts of thoughtless comers.”

This, however, seems to me no more conclusive than might be the spectacle of a battlefield, or of the ravages of alcoholism, to a superhuman observer bent on establishing the limits of human understanding. Indeed, less so, perhaps; for the situation of the bee, when compared with our own, is strange in this world. It was intended to live in the midst of an indifferent and unconscious nature, and not by the side of an extraordinary being who is forever disturbing the most constant laws, and producing grandiose, inexplicable phenomena. In the natural order of things, in the monotonous life of the forest, the madness Langstroth describes would be possible only were some accident suddenly to destroy a hive full of honey. But in this case, even, there would be no fatal glass, no boiling sugar or cloying syrup; no death or danger, therefore, other than that to which every animal is exposed while seeking its prey.

Should we be more successful than they in preserving our presence of mind if some strange power were at every step to ensnare our reason? Let us not be too hasty in condemning the bees for the folly whereof we are the authors, or in deriding their intellect, which is as poorly equipped to foil our artifices as our own would be to foil those of some superior creature unknown to us to-day, but on that account not impossible. None such being known at present, we conclude that we stand on the topmost pinnacle of life on this earth; but this belief, after all, is by no means infallible. I am not assuming that when our actions are unreasonable, or contemptible, we merely fall into the snares that such a creature has laid; though it is not inconceivable that this should one day be proved true. On the other hand, it cannot be wise to deny intelligence to the bee because it has not yet succeeded in distinguishing us from the great ape or the bear. It is certain that there are, in us and about us, influences and powers no less dissimilar whose distinction escapes us as readily.

And finally, to end this apology, wherein I seem somewhat to have fallen into the error I laid to Sir John Lubbock’s charge, does not the capacity for folly so great in itself argue intelligence? For thus it is ever in the uncertain domain of the intellect, apparently the most vacillating and precarious condition of matter. The same light that falls on the intellect falls also on passion, whereof none can tell whether it be the smoke of the flame or the wick. In the case above it has not been mere animal desire to gorge themselves with honey that has urged on the bees. They could do this at their leisure in the store-rooms at home. Watch them in an analogous circumstance; follow them; you will see that, as soon as their sac is filled, they will return to the hive and add their spoil to the general store; and visit the marvellous vintage, and leave it, perhaps thirty times in an hour. Their admirable labours, therefore, are inspired by a single desire: zeal to bring as much wealth as they can to the home of their sisters, which is also the home of the future. When we discover a cause as disinterested for the follies of men, we are apt to call them by another name.

[44]

However, the whole truth must be told. In the midst of the marvels of their industry, their policy, their sacrifice, one thing exists that must always check and weaken our admiration; and this is the indifference with which they regard the misfortunes or death of their comrades. There is a strange duality in the character of the bee. In the heart of the hive all help and love each other. They are as united as the good thoughts that dwell in the same soul. Wound one of them, and a thousand will sacrifice themselves to avenge its injury. But outside the hive they no longer recognise each other. Mutilate them, crush them,–or rather, do nothing of the kind; it would be a useless cruelty, for the fact is established beyond any doubt,–but were you to mutilate, or crush, on a piece of comb placed a few steps from their dwelling, twenty or thirty bees that have all issued from the same hive, those you have left untouched will not even turn their heads. With their tongue, fantastic as a Chinese weapon, they will tranquilly continue to absorb the liquid they hold more precious than life, heedless of the agony whose last gestures almost are touching them, of the cries of distress that arise all around. And when the comb is empty, so great is their anxiety that nothing shall be lost, that their eagerness to gather the honey which clings to the victims will induce them tranquilly to climb over dead and dying, unmoved by the presence of the first and never dreaming of helping the others. In this case, therefore, they have no notion of the danger they run, seeing that they are wholly untroubled by the death that is scattered about them, and they have not the slightest sense of solidarity or pity. As regards the danger, the explanation lies ready to hand; the bees know not the meaning of fear, and, with the exception only of smoke, are afraid of nothing in the world. Outside the hive, they display extreme condescension and forbearance. They will avoid whatever disturbs them, and affect to ignore its existence, so long as it come not too close; as though aware that this universe belongs to all, that each one has his place there, and must needs be discreet and peaceful. But beneath this indulgence is quietly hidden a heart so sure of itself that it never dreams of protesting. If they are threatened, they will alter their course, but never attempt to escape. In the hive, however, they will not confine themselves to this passive ignoring of peril. They will spring with incredible fury on any living thing, ant or lion or man, that dares to profane the sacred ark. This we may term anger, ridiculous obstinacy, or heroism, according as our mind be disposed.

But of their want of solidarity outside the hive, and even of sympathy within it, I can find nothing to say. Are we to believe that each form of intellect possesses its own strange limitation, and that the tiny flame which with so much difficulty at last burns its way through inert matter and issues forth from the brain, is still so uncertain that if it illumine one point more strongly the others are forced into blacker darkness? Here we find that the bees (or nature acting within them) have organised work in common, the love and cult of the future, in a manner more perfect than can elsewhere be discovered. Is it for this reason that they have lost sight of all the rest? They give their love to what lies ahead of them; we bestow ours on what is around. And we who love here, perhaps, have no love left for what is beyond. Nothing varies so much as the direction of pity or charity. We ourselves should formerly have been far less shocked than we are to-day at the insensibility of the bees; and to many an ancient people such conduct would not have seemed blameworthy. And further, can we tell how many of the things that we do would shock a being who might be watching us as we watch the bees?

IV

THE LIFE OF THE BEE

[45]

LET us now, in order to form a clearer conception of the bees’ intellectual power, proceed to consider their methods of inter-communication. There can be no doubting that they understand each other; and indeed it were surely impossible for a republic so considerable, wherein the labours are so varied and so marvellously combined, to subsist amid the silence and spiritual isolation of so many thousand creatures. They must be able, therefore, to give expression to thoughts and feelings, by means either of a phonetic vocabulary or more probably of some kind of tactile language or magnetic intuition, corresponding perhaps to senses and properties of matter wholly unknown to ourselves. And such intuition well might lodge in the mysterious antennae–containing, in the case of the workers, according to Cheshire’s calculation, twelve thousand tactile hairs and five thousand “smell-hollows,” wherewith they probe and fathom the darkness. For the mutual understanding of the bees is not confined to their habitual labours; the extraordinary also has a name and place in their language; as is proved by the manner in which news, good or bad, normal or supernatural, will at once spread in the hive; the loss or return of the mother, for instance, the entrance of an enemy, the intrusion of a strange queen, the approach of a band of marauders, the discovery of treasure, etc. And so characteristic is their attitude, so essentially different their murmur at each of these special events, that the experienced apiarist can without difficulty tell what is troubling the crowd that moves distractedly to and fro in the shadow.

If you desire a more definite proof, you have but to watch a bee that shall just have discovered a few drops of honey on your window-sill or the corner of your table. She will immediately gorge herself with it; and so eagerly, that you will have time, without fear of disturbing her, to mark her tiny belt with a touch of paint. But this gluttony of hers is all on the surface; the honey will not pass into the stomach proper, into what we might call her personal stomach, but remains in the sac, the first stomach,–that of the community, if one may so express it. This reservoir full, the bee will depart, but not with the free and thoughtless motion of the fly or butterfly; she, on the contrary, will for some moments fly backwards, hovering eagerly about the table or window, with her head turned toward the room.

She is reconnoitring, fixing in her memory the exact position of the treasure. Thereupon she will go to the hive, disgorge her plunder into one of the provision-cells, and in three or four minutes return, and resume operations at the providential window. And thus, while the honey lasts, will she come and go, at intervals of every five minutes, till evening, if need be; without interruption or rest; pursuing her regular journeys from the hive to the window, from the window back to the hive.

[46]

Many of those who have written on bees have thought fit to adorn the truth; I myself have no such desire. For studies of this description to possess any interest, it is essential that they should remain absolutely sincere. Had the conclusion been forced upon me that bees are incapable of communicating to each other news of an event occurring outside the hive, I should, I imagine, as a set-off against the slight disappointment this discovery would have entailed, have derived some degree of satisfaction in recognising once more that man, after all, is the only truly intelligent being who inhabits our globe. And there comes too a period of life when we have more joy in saying the thing that is true than in saying the thing that merely is wonderful. Here as in every case the principle holds that, should the naked truth appear at the moment less interesting, less great and noble than the imaginary embellishment it lies in our power to bestow, the fault must rest with ourselves who still are unable to perceive the astonishing relation in which this truth always must stand to our being, and to universal law; and in that case it is not the truth, but our intellect, that needs embellishment and ennoblement.

I will frankly confess, therefore, that the marked bee often returns alone. Shall we believe that in bees there exists the same difference of character as in men; that of them too some are gossips, and others prone to silence? A friend who stood by and watched my experiment, declared that it was evidently mere selfishness or vanity that caused so many of the bees to refrain from revealing the source of their wealth, and from sharing with others the glory of an achievement that must seem miraculous to the hive. These were sad vices indeed, which give not forth the sweet odour, so fragrant and loyal, that springs from the home of the many thousand sisters. But, whatever the cause, it often will also happen that the bee whom fortune has favoured will return to the honey accompanied by two or three friends. I am aware that Sir John Lubbock, in the appendix to his book on “Ants, Bees, and Wasps,” records the results of his investigations in long and minute tables; and from these we are led to infer that it is a matter of rarest occurrence for a single bee to follow the one who has made the discovery. The learned naturalist does not name the race of bees which he selected for his experiments, or tell us whether the conditions were especially unfavourable. As for myself I only can say that my own tables, compiled with great care,–and every possible precaution having been taken that the bees should not be directly attracted by the odour of the honey,–establish that on an average one bee will bring others four times out of ten.

I even one day came across an extraordinary little Italian bee, whose belt I had marked with a touch of blue paint. In her second trip she brought two of her sisters, whom I imprisoned, without interfering with her. She departed once more, and this time returned with three friends, whom I again confined, and so till the end of the afternoon, when, counting my prisoners, I found that she had told the news to no less than eighteen bees.

In fact you will find, if you make this experiment yourself, that communication, if not general, at least is frequent. The possession of this faculty is so well known to American bee-hunters that they trade upon it when engaged in searching for nests. Mr. Josiah Emery remarks on this head (quoted by Romanes in his “Intellect of Animals “): “Going to a field or wood at a distance from tame bees with their box of honey, they gather up from the flowers and imprison one or more bees, and after they have become sufficiently gorged, let them out to return to their home with their easily gotten load. Waiting patiently a longer or shorter time, according to the distance of the bee-tree, the hunter scarcely ever fails to see the bee or bees return accompanied by other bees, which are in like manner imprisoned till they in turn are filled; then one or more are let out at places distant from each other, and the direction in which the bee flies noted; and thus, by a kind of triangulation, the position of the bee-tree proximately ascertained.”

[47]

You will notice too in your experiments that the friends who appear to obey the behests of good fortune do not always fly together, and that there will often be an interval of several seconds between the different arrivals. As regards these communications, therefore, we must ask ourselves the question that Sir John Lubbock has solved as far as the ants are concerned.

Do the comrades who flock to the treasure only follow the bee that first made the discovery, or have they been sent on by her, and do they find it through following her indications, her description of the place where it lies? Between these two hypotheses, that refer directly to the extent and working of the bee’s intellect, there is obviously an enormous difference. The English savant has succeeded, by means of an elaborate and ingenious arrangement of gangways, corridors, moats full of water, and flying bridges, in establishing that the ants in such cases do no more than follow in the track of the pioneering insect. With ants, that can be made to pass where one will, such experiments are possible; but for the bee, whose wings throw every avenue open, some other expedient must of necessity be contrived. I imagined the following, which, though it gave no definite result, might yet, under more favourable conditions, and if organised more carefully, give rise to definite and satisfactory conclusions.

My study in the country is on the first floor, above a somewhat lofty room; sufficiently high, therefore, to be out of the ordinary range of the bees’ flight, except at times when the chestnuts and lime trees are in bloom. And for more than a week before I started this experiment I had kept on my table an open comb of honey, without the perfume having attracted, or induced the visit of, a single bee. Then I went to a glass hive that was close to the house, took an Italian bee, brought her to my study, set her on the comb, and marked her while she was feeding.

When satisfied, she flew away and returned to the hive. I followed, saw her pass over the surface of the crowd, plunge her head into an empty cell, disgorge her honey, and prepare to set forth again. At the door of the hive I had placed a glass box, divided by a trap into two compartments. The bee flew into this box; and as she was alone, and no other bee seemed to accompany or follow her, I imprisoned her and left her there. I then repeated the experiment on twenty different bees in succession. When the marked bee reappeared alone, I imprisoned her as I had imprisoned the first. But eight of them came to the threshold of the hive and entered the box accompanied by two or three friends. By means of the trap I was able to separate the marked bee from her companions, and to keep her a prisoner in the first compartment. Then, having marked her companions with a different colour, I threw open the second compartment and set them at liberty, myself returning quickly to my study to await their arrival. Now it is evident that if a verbal or magnetic communication had passed, indicating the place, describing the way, etc., a certain number of the bees, having been furnished with this information, should have found their way to my room. I am compelled to admit that there came but a single one. Was this mere chance, or had she followed instructions received? The experiment was insufficient, but circumstances prevented me from carrying it further. I released the “baited” bees, and my study soon was besieged by the buzzing crowd to whom they had taught the way to the treasure.

We need not concern ourselves with this incomplete attempt of mine, for many other curious traits compel us to recognise the existence among the bees of spiritual communications that go beyond a mere “yes” or “no,” and that are manifest in cases where mere example or gesture would not be sufficient. Of such, for instance, are the remarkable harmony of their work in the hive, the extraordinary division of labour, the regularity with which one worker will take the place of another, etc. I have often marked bees that went foraging in the morning, and found that, in the afternoon, unless flowers were specially abundant, they would be engaged in heating and fanning the brood-cells, or perhaps would form part of the mysterious, motionless curtain in whose midst the wax-makers and sculptors would be at work. Similarly I have noticed that workers whom I have seen gathering pollen for the whole of one day, will bring no pollen back on the morrow, but will concern themselves exclusively with the search for nectar, and vice-versa.

[48]

And further, we might mention what M. Georges de Layens, the celebrated French apiarist, terms the “Distribution of Bees over Melliferous Plants.” Day after day, at the first hour of sunrise, the explorers of the dawn return, and the hive awakes to receive the good news of the earth. “The lime trees are blossoming to-day on the banks of the canal.” “The grass by the roadside is gay with white clover.” “The sage and the lotus are about to open.” “The mignonette, the lilies are overflowing with pollen.” Whereupon the bees must organise quickly, and arrange to divide the work. Five thousand of the sturdiest will sully forth to the lime trees, while three thousand juniors go and refresh the white clover. Those who yesterday were absorbing nectar from the corollas will to-day repose their tongue and the glands of their sac, and gather red pollen from the mignonette, or yellow pollen from the tall lilies; for never shall you see a bee collecting or mixing pollen of a different colour or species; and indeed one of the chief pre-occupations of the hive is the methodical bestowal of these pollens in the store-rooms, in strict accordance with their origin and colour. Thus does the hidden genius issue its commands. The workers immediately sally forth, in long black files, whereof each one will fly straight to its allotted task. “The bees,” says De Layens, “would seem to be perfectly informed as to the locality, the relative melliferous value, and the distance of every melliferous plant within a certain radius from the hive.

“If we carefully note the different directions in which these foragers fly, and observe in detail the harvest they gather from the various plants around, we shall find that the workers distribute themselves over the flowers in proportion not only to the numbers of flowers of one species, but also to their melliferous value. Nay, more–they make daily calculations as to the means of obtaining the greatest possible wealth of saccharine liquid. In the spring, for instance, after the willows have bloomed, when the fields still are bare, and the first flowers of the woods are the one resource of the bees, we shall see them eagerly visiting gorse and violets, lungworts and anemones. But, a few days later, when fields of cabbage and colza begin to flower in sufficient abundance, we shall find that the bees will almost entirely forsake the plants in the woods, though these be still in full blossom, and will confine their visits to the flowers of cabbage and colza alone. In this fashion they regulate, day by day, their distribution over the plants, so as to collect the greatest value of saccharine liquid in the least possible time.

“It may fairly be claimed, therefore, for the colony of bees that, in its harvesting labours no less than in its internal economy, it is able to establish a rational distribution of the number of workers without ever disturbing the principle of the division of labour.”

[49]

But what have we to do, some will ask, with the intelligence of the bees? What concern is it of ours whether this be a little less or a little more? Why weigh, with such infinite care, a minute fragment of almost invisible matter, as though it were a fluid whereon depended the destiny of man? I hold, and exaggerate nothing, that our interest herein is of the most considerable. The discovery of a sign of true intellect outside ourselves procures us something of the emotion Robinson Crusoe felt when he saw the imprint of a human foot on the sandy beach of his island. We seem less solitary than we had believed. And indeed, in our endeavour to understand the intellect of the bees, we are studying in them that which is most precious in our own substance: an atom of the extraordinary matter which possesses, wherever it attach itself, the magnificent power of transfiguring blind necessity, of organising, embellishing, and multiplying life; and, most striking of all, of holding in suspense the obstinate force of death, and the mighty, irresponsible wave that wraps almost all that exists in an eternal unconsciousness.

Were we sole possessors of the particle of matter that, when maintained in a special condition of flower or incandescence, we term the intellect, we should to some extent be entitled to look on ourselves as privileged beings, and to imagine that in us nature achieved some kind of aim; but here we discover, in the hymenoptera, an entire category of beings in whom a more or less identical aim is achieved. And this fact, though it decide nothing perhaps, still holds an honourable place in the mass of tiny facts that help to throw light on our position in this world. It affords even, if considered from a certain point of view, a fresh proof of the most enigmatic part of our being; for the superpositions of destinies that we find in the hive are surveyed by us from an eminence loftier than any we can attain for the contemplation of the destinies of man. There we see before us, in miniature, the large and simple lines that in our own disproportionate sphere we never have the occasion to disentangle and follow to the end. Spirit and matter are there, the race and the individual, evolution and permanence, life and death, the past and the future; all gathered together in a retreat that our hand can lift and one look of our eye embrace. And may we not reasonably ask ourselves whether the mere size of a body, and the room that it fills in time and space, can modify to the extent we imagine the secret idea of nature; the idea that we try to discover in the little history of the hive, which in a few days already is ancient, no less than in the great history of man, of whom three generations overlap a long century?

[50]

Let us go on, then, with the story of our hive; let us take it up where we left it; and raise, as high as we may, a fold of the festooned curtain in whose midst a strange sweat, white as snow and airier than the down of a wing, is beginning to break over the swarm. For the wax that is now being born is not like the wax that we know; it is immaculate, it has no weight; seeming truly to be the soul of the honey, that itself is the spirit of flowers. And this motionless incantation has called it forth that it may serve us, later–in memory of its origin, doubtless, wherein it is one with the azure sky, and heavy with perfumes of magnificence and purity–as the fragrant light of the last of our altars.

[51]

To follow the various phases of the secretion and employment of wax by a swarm that is beginning to build, is a matter of very great difficulty. All comes to pass in the blackest depths of the crowd, whose agglomeration, growing denser and denser, produces the temperature needful for this exudation, which is the privilege of the youngest bees. Huber, who was the first to study these phenomena, bringing incredible patience to bear and exposing himself at times to very serious danger, devotes to them more than two hundred and fifty pages; which, though of considerable interest, are necessarily somewhat confused. But I am not treating this subject technically; and while referring when necessary to Huber’s admirable studies, I shall confine myself generally to relating what is patent to any one who may gather a swarm into a glass hive.

We have to admit, first of all, that we know not yet by what process of alchemy the honey transforms itself into wax in the enigmatic bodies of our suspended bees. We can only say that they will remain thus suspended for a period extending from eighteen to twenty-four hours, in a temperature so high that one might almost believe that a fire was burning in the hollow of the hive; and then white and transparent scales will appear at the opening of four little pockets that every bee has underneath its abdomen.

When the bodies of most of those who form the inverted cone have thus been adorned with ivory tablets, we shall see one of the bees, as though suddenly inspired, abruptly detach herself from the mass, and climb over the backs of the passive crowd till she reach the inner pinnacle of the cupola. To this she will fix herself solidly, dislodging, with repeated blows of her head, such of her neighbours as may seem to hamper her movements. Then, with her mouth and claws, she will seize one of the eight scales that hang from her abdomen, and at once proceed to clip it and plane it, extend it, knead it with her saliva, bend it and flatten it, roll it and straighten it, with the skill of a carpenter handling a pliable panel. When at last the substance, thus treated, appears to her to possess the required dimensions and consistency, she will attach it to the highest point of the dome, thus laying the first, or rather the keystone of the new town; for we have here an inverted city, hanging down from the sky, and not rising from the bosom of earth like a city of men.

To this keystone, depending in the void, she will add other fragments of wax that she takes in succession from beneath her rings of horn; and finally, with one last lick of the tongue, one last wave of antennae, she will go as suddenly as she came, and disappear in the crowd. Another will at once take her place, continue the work at the point where the first one has left it, add on her own, change and adjust whatever may seem to offend the ideal plan of the tribe, then vanish in her turn, to be succeeded by a third, a fourth, and a fifth, all appearing unexpectedly, suddenly, one after the other, none completing the work, but each bringing her share to the task in which all combine.

[52]

A small block of wax, formless as yet, hangs down from the top of the vault. So soon as its thickness may be deemed sufficient, we shall see another bee emerge from the mass, her physical appearance differing appreciably from that of the foundresses who preceded her. And her manner displays such settled conviction, her movements are followed so eagerly by all the crowd, that we almost might fancy that some illustrious engineer had been summoned to trace in the void the site of the first cell of all, from which every other must mathematically depend. This bee belongs to the sculptor or carver class of workers; she produces no wax herself and is content to deal with the materials others provide. She locates the first cell, scoops into the block for an instant, lays the wax she has removed from the cavity on the borders around it; and then, like the foundresses, abruptly departs and abandons her model. Her place is taken at once by an impatient worker, who continues the task that a third will finish, while others close by are attacking the rest of the surface and the opposite side of the wall; each one obeying the general law of interrupted and successive labour, as though it were an inherent principle of the hive that the pride of toil should be distributed, and every achievement be anonymous and common to all, that it might thereby become more fraternal.

[53]

The outline of the nascent comb may soon be divined. In form it will still be lenticular, for the little prismatic tubes that compose it are unequal in length, and diminish in proportion as they recede from the centre to the extremities. In thickness and appearance at present it more or less resembles a human tongue whose sides might be formed of hexagonal cells, contiguous, and placed back to back.

The first cells having been built, the foundresses proceed to add a second block of wax to the roof; and so in gradation a third and a fourth. These blocks follow each other at regular intervals so nicely calculated that when, at a much later period, the comb shall be fully developed, there will be ample space for the bees to move between its parallel walls.

Their plan must therefore embrace the final thickness of every comb, which will be from eighty-eight to ninety-two hundredths of an inch, and at the same time the width of the avenues between, which must be about half an inch, or in other words twice the height of a bee, since there must be room to pass back to back between the combs.

The bees, however, are not infallible, nor does their certainty appear mechanical. They will commit grave errors at times, when circumstances present unusual difficulty. They will often leave too much space, or too little, between the combs. This they will remedy as best they can, either by giving an oblique twist to the comb that too nearly approaches the other, or by introducing an irregular comb into the gap. “The bees sometimes make mistakes,” Reaumur remarks on this subject,” and herein we may find yet another fact which appears to prove that they reason.”

[54]

We know that the bees construct four kinds of cells. First of all, the royal cells, which are exceptional, and contrived somewhat in the shape of an acorn; then the large cells destined for the rearing of males and storing of provisions when flowers super-abound; and the small cells, serving as workers’ cradles and ordinary store-rooms, which occupy normally about four-fifths of the built-over surface of the hive. And lastly, so as to connect in orderly fashion the larger cells with the small, the bees will erect a certain number of what are known as transition cells. These must of necessity be irregular in form; but so unerringly accurate are the dimensions of the second and third types that, at the time when the decimal system was established, and a fixed measure sought in nature to serve as a starting-point and an incontestable standard, it was proposed by Reaumur to select for this purpose the cell of the bee.*

*It was as well, perhaps, that this standard was not adopted. For although the diameter of the cells is admirably regular, it is, like all things produced by a living organism, not _mathematically_ invariable in the same hive. Further, as M. Maurice Girard has pointed out, the apothem of the cell varies among different races of bees, so that the standard would alter from hive to hive, according to the species of bee that inhabited it.

Each of the cells is an hexagonal tube placed on a pyramidal base; and two layers of these tubes form the comb, their bases being opposed to each other in such fashion that each of the three rhombs or lozenges which on one side constitute the pyramidal base of one cell, composes at the same time the pyramidal base of three cells on the other. It is in these prismatic tubes that the honey is stored; and to prevent its escaping during the period of maturation,–which would infallibly happen if the tubes were as strictly horizontal as they appear to be,–the bees incline them slightly, to an angle of 4 deg or 5 deg.

“Besides the economy of wax,” says Reaumur, when considering this marvellous construction in its entirety,” besides the economy of wax that results from the disposition of the cells, and the fact that this arrangement allows the bees to fill the comb without leaving a single spot vacant, there are other advantages also with respect to the solidity of the work. The angle at the base of each cell, the apex of the pyramidal cavity, is buttressed by the ridge formed by two faces of the hexagon of another cell. The two triangles, or extensions of the hexagon faces which fill one of the convergent angles of the cavity enclosed by the three rhombs, form by their junction a plane angle on the side they touch; each of these angles, concave within the cell, supports, on its convex side, one of the sheets employed to form the hexagon of another cell; the sheet, pressing on this angle, resists the force which is tending to push it outwards; and in this fashion the angles are strengthened. Every advantage that could be desired with regard to the solidity of each cell is procured by its own formation and its position with reference to the others.”

[55]

“There are only,” says Dr. Reid, “three possible figures of the cells which can make them all equal and similar, without any useless interstices. These are the equilateral triangle, the square, and the regular hexagon. Mathematicians know that there is not a fourth way possible in which a plane shall be cut into little spaces that shall be equal, similar, and regular, without useless spaces. Of the three figures, the hexagon is the most proper for convenience and strength. Bees, as if they knew this, make their cells regular hexagons.

“Again, it has been demonstrated that, by making the bottoms of the cells to consist of three planes meeting in a point, there is a saving of material and labour in no way inconsiderable. The bees, as if acquainted with these principles of solid geometry, follow them most accurately. It is a curious mathematical problem at what precise angle the three planes which compose the bottom of a cell ought to meet, in order to make the greatest possible saving, or the least expense of material and labour.* This is one of the problems which belong to the higher parts of mathematics. It has accordingly been resolved by some mathematicians, particularly by the ingenious Maclaurin, by a fluctionary calculation which is to be found in the Transactions of the Royal Society of London. He has determined precisely the angle required, and he found, by the most exact mensuration the subject would admit, that it is the very angle in which the three planes at the bottom of the cell of a honey comb do actually meet.”

*Reaumur suggested the following problem to the celebrated mathematician Koenig: “Of all possible hexagonal cells with pyramidal base composed of three equal and similar rhombs, to find the one whose construction would need the least material.” Koenig’s answer was, the cell that had for its base three rhombs whose large angle was 109 deg 26′, and the small 70 deg 34′. Another savant, Maraldi, had measured as exactly as possible the angles of the rhombs constructed by the bees, and discovered the larger to be 109 deg 28′, and the other 70 deg 32′. Between the two solutions there was a difference, therefore, of only 2′. It is probable that the error, if error there be, should be attributed to Maraldi rather than to the bees; for it is impossible for any instrument to measure the angles of the cells, which are not very clearly defined, with infallible precision.

The problem suggested to Koenig was put to another mathematician, Cramer, whose solution came even closer to that of the bees, viz., 109 deg 28 1/2′ for the large angle, and 70 deg 31 1/2′ for the small.

[56]

I myself do not believe that the bees indulge in these abstruse calculations; but, on the other hand, it seems equally impossible to me that such astounding results can be due to chance alone, or to the mere force of circumstance. The wasps, for instance, also build combs with hexagonal cells, so that for them the problem was identical, and they have solved it in a far less ingenious fashion. Their combs have only one layer of cells, thus lacking the common base that serves the bees for their two opposite layers. The wasps’ comb, therefore, is not only less regular, but also less substantial; and so wastefully constructed that, besides loss of material, they must sacrifice about a third of the available space and a quarter of the energy they put forth. Again, we find that the trigonae and meliponae, which are veritable and domesticated bees, though of less advanced civilisation, erect only one row of rearing-cells, and support their horizontal, superposed combs on shapeless and costly columns of wax. Their provision-cells are merely great pots, gathered together without any order; and, at the point between the spheres where these might have intersected and induced a profitable economy of space and material, the meliponae clumsily insert a section of cells with flat walls. Indeed, to compare one of their nests with the mathematical cities of our own honey-flies, is like imagining a hamlet composed of primitive huts side by side with a modern town; whose ruthless regularity is the logical, though perhaps somewhat charmless, result of the genius of man, that to-day, more fiercely than ever before, seeks to conquer space, matter, and time.

[57]

There is a theory, originally propounded by Buffon and now revived, which assumes that the bees have not the least intention of constructing hexagons with a pyramidal base, but that their desire is merely to contrive round cells in the wax; only, that as their neighbours, and those at work on the opposite side of the comb, are digging at the same moment and with the same intentions, the points where the cells meet must of necessity become hexagonal. Besides, it is said, this is precisely what happens to crystals, the scales of certain kinds of fish, soap-bubbles, etc., as it happens in the following experiment that Buffon suggested. “If,” he said, “you fill a dish with peas or any other cylindrical bean, pour as much water into it as the space between the beans will allow, close it carefully and then boil the water, you will find that all these cylinders have become six-sided columns. And the reason is evident, being indeed purely mechanical; each of the cylindrical beans tends, as it swells, to occupy the utmost possible space within a given space; wherefore it follows that the reciprocal compression compels them all to become hexagonal. Similarly each bee seeks to occupy the utmost possible space within a given space, with the necessary result that, its body being cylindrical, the cells become hexagonal for the same reason as before, viz., the working of reciprocal obstacles.”

[58]

These reciprocal obstacles, it would seem, are capable of marvellous achievement; on the same principle, doubtless, that the vices of man produce a general virtue, whereby the human race, hateful often in its individuals, ceases to be so in the mass. We might reply, first of all, with Brougham, Kirby and Spence, and others, that experiments with peas and soap-bubbles prove nothing; for the reason that in both cases the pressure produces only irregular forms, and in no wise explains the existence of the prismatic base of the cells. But above all we might answer that there are more ways than one of dealing with rigid necessity; that the wasp, the humble-bee, the trigonae and meliponae of Mexico and Brazil achieve very different and manifestly inferior results, although the circumstances, and their own intentions, are absolutely identical with those of the bees. It might further be urged that if the bee’s cell does indeed follow the law that governs crystals, snow, soap-bubbles, as well as Buffon’s boiled peas, it also, through its general symmetry, disposition in opposite layers, and angle of inclination, obeys many other laws that are not to be found in matter. May we not say, too, of man that all his genius is comprised in his fashion of handling kindred necessities? And if it appear to us that his manner of treating these is the best there can possibly be, the reason only can lie in the absence of a judge superior to ourselves. But it is well that argument should make way for fact; and indeed, to the objection based on an experiment, the best reply of all must be a counter-experiment.

In order to satisfy myself that hexagonal architecture truly was written in the spirit of the bee, I cut off and removed one day a disc of the size of a five-franc piece from the centre of a comb, at a spot where there were both brood-cells and cells full of honey. I cut into the circumference of this disc, at the intersecting point of the pyramidal cells; inserted a piece of tin on the base of one of these sections, shaped exactly to its dimensions, and possessed of resistance sufficient to prevent the bees from bending or twisting it. Then I replaced the slice of comb, duly furnished with its slab of tin, on the spot whence I had removed it; so that, while one side of the comb presented no abnormal feature, the damage having been repaired, the other displayed a sort of deep cavity, covering the space of about thirty cells, with the piece of tin as its base. The bees were disconcerted at first; they flocked in numbers to inspect and examine this curious chasm; day after day they wandered agitatedly to and fro, apparently unable to form a decision. But, as I fed them copiously every evening, there came a moment when they had no more cells available for the storage of provisions. Thereupon they probably summoned their great engineers, distinguished sculptors, and wax-workers, and invited them to turn this useless cavity to profitable account.

The wax-makers having gathered around and formed themselves into a dense festoon, so that the necessary heat might be maintained, other bees descended into the hole and proceeded solidly to attach the metal, and connect it with the walls of adjacent cells, by means of little waxen hooks which they distributed regularly over its surface. In the upper semicircle of the disc they then began to construct three or four cells, uniting these to the hooks. Each of these transition, or accommodation, cells was more or less deformed at the top, to allow of its being soldered to the adjoining cell on the comb; but its lower portion already designed on the tin three very clear angles, whence there ran three little straight lines that correctly indicated the first half of the following cell.

After forty-eight hours, and notwithstanding the fact that only three bees at a time were able to work in the cavity, the entire surface of the tin was covered with outlined cells. These were less regular, certainly, than those of an ordinary comb; wherefore the queen, having inspected them, wisely declined to lay any eggs there, for the generation that would have arisen therefrom would necessarily have been deformed. Each cell, however, was a perfect hexagon; nor did it contain a single crooked line, a single curved figure or angle. And yet the ordinary conditions had all been changed; the cells had neither been scooped out of a block, according to Huber’s description, nor had they been designed within a waxen hood, and, from being circular at first, been subsequently converted into hexagons by the pressure of adjoining cells, as explained by Darwin. Neither could there be question here of reciprocal obstacles, the cells having been formed one by one, and their first lines traced on what practically was a bare table. It would seem incontestable, therefore, that the hexagon is not merely the result of mechanical necessities, but that it has its true place in the plans, the experience, the intellect and will of the bee. I may relate here another curious instance of the workers’ sagacity: the cells they built on the tin had no other base than the metal itself. The engineers of the corps had evidently decided that the tin could adequately retain the honey; and had considered that, the substance being impermeable, they need not waste the material they value so highly by covering the metal with a layer of wax. But, a short time after, some drops of honey having been placed in two of these cells, the bees discovered, in tasting it, that the contact of the metal had a deteriorating effect. Thereupon they reconsidered the matter, and covered over with wax the entire surface of the tin.

[59]

Were it our desire to throw light upon all the secrets of this geometric architecture, we should have more than one curious question still to consider; as for instance the shape of the first cells, which, being attached to the roof, are modified in such a manner as to touch the roof at the greatest possible number of points.

The design of the principal thoroughfares is determined by the parallelism of the combs; but we must admire the ingenious construction of alleys and gangways through and around the comb, so skilfully contrived as to provide short cuts in every direction and prevent congestion of traffic, while ensuring free circulation of air. And finally we should have to study the construction of transition cells, wherein we see a unanimous instinct at work that impels the bees at a given moment to increase the size of their dwellings. Three reasons may dictate this step: an extraordinary harvest may call for larger receptacles, the workers may consider the population to be sufficiently numerous, or it may have become necessary that males should be born. Nor can we in such cases refrain from wondering at the ingenious economy, the unerring, harmonious conviction, with which the bees will pass from the small to the large, from the large to the small; from perfect symmetry to, where unavoidable, its very reverse, returning to ideal regularity so soon as the laws of a live geometry will allow; and all the time not losing a cell, not suffering a single one of their numerous structures to be sacrificed, to be ridiculous, uncertain, or barbarous, or any section thereof to become unfit for use. But I fear that I have already wandered into many details that will have but slender interest for the reader, whose eyes perhaps may never have followed a flight of bees; or who may have regarded them only with the passing interest with which we are all of us apt to regard the flower, the bird or the precious stone, asking of these no more than a slight superficial assurance, and forgetting that the most trivial secret of the non-human object we behold in nature connects more closely perhaps with the profound enigma of our origin and our end, than the secret of those of our passions that we study the most eagerly and the most passionately.

[60]

And I will pass over too–in my desire that this essay shall not become too didactic–the remarkable instinct that induces the bees at times to thin and demolish the extremity of their combs, when these are to be enlarged or lengthened; though it must be admitted that in this case the “blind building instinct” fails signally to account for their demolishing in order that they may rebuild, or undoing what has been done that it may be done afresh, and with more regularity. I will content myself also with a mere reference to the remarkable experiment that enables us, with the aid of a piece of glass, to compel the bees to start their combs at a right angle; when they most ingeniously contrive that the enlarged cells on the convex side shall coincide with the reduced cells on the concave side of the comb.

But before finally quitting this subject let us pause, though it be but for an instant, and consider the mysterious fashion in which they manage to act in concert and combine their labour, when simultaneously carving two opposite sides of a comb, and unable therefore to see each other. Take a finished comb to the light, fix your eyes on the diaphanous wax; you will see, most clearly designed, an entire network of sharply cut prisms, a whole system of concordances so infallible that one might almost believe them to be stamped on steel.

I wonder whether those who never have seen the interior of a hive can form an adequate conception of the arrangement and aspect of the combs. Let them imagine–we will take a peasant’s hive, where the bee is left entirely to its own resources–let them imagine a dome of straw or osier, divided from top to bottom by five, six, eight, sometimes ten, strips of wax, resembling somewhat great slices of bread, that run in strictly parallel lines from the top of the dome to the floor, espousing closely the shape of the ovoid walls. Between these strips is contrived a space of about half an inch, to enable the bees to stand and to pass each other. At the moment when they begin to construct one of these strips at the top of the hive, the waxen wall (which is its rough model, and will later be thinned and extended) is still very thick, and completely excludes the fifty or sixty bees at work on its inner face from the fifty or sixty simultaneously engaged in carving the outer, so that it is wholly impossible for one group to see the other, unless indeed their sight be able to penetrate opaque matter. And yet there is not a hole that is scooped on the inner surface, not a fragment of wax that is added, but corresponds with mathematical precision to a protuberance or cavity on the outer surface, and vice versa. How does this happen? How is it that one does not dig too deep, another not deep enough? Whence the invariable magical coincidence between the angles of the lozenges? What is it tells the bees that at this point they must begin, and at that point stop? Once again we must content ourselves with the reply, that is no reply: “It is a mystery of the hive.”

Huber has sought to explain this mystery by suggesting that the pressure of the bees’ hooks and teeth may possibly produce slight projections, at regular intervals, on the opposite side of the comb; or that they may be able to estimate the thickness of the block by the flexibility, elasticity, or some other physical quality of the wax; or again, that their antennae, which seem so well adapted for the questioning of the finer, less evident side of things, may serve as a compass in the invisible; or, lastly, that the position of every cell may derive mathematically from the arrangement and dimensions of the cells on the first row, and thus dispense with the need for further measurement. But these explanations are evidently insufficient; the first are mere hypotheses that cannot be verified, the others do no more than transplant the mystery. And useful as it may be to transplant mystery as often as we possibly can, it were not wise to imagine that a mystery has ceased to be because we have shifted its home.

[61]

Now let us leave these dreary building grounds, this geometrical desert of cells. The combs have been started, and are becoming habitable. Though it be here the infinitely little that, without apparent hope, adds itself to the infinitely little; though our eye with its limited vision look and see nothing, the work of wax, halting neither by day nor by night, will advance with incredible quickness. The impatient queen already has more than once paced the stockades that gleam white in the darkness; and no sooner is the first row of dwellings complete than she takes possession with her escort of counsellors, guardians, or servants–for we know not whether she lead or be led, be venerated or supervised. When the spot has been reached that she, or her urgent advisers, may regard as favourable, she arches her back, bends forward, and introduces the extremity of her long spindle-shaped abdomen into one of the cells; the-little eager heads of her escort meanwhile forming a passionate circle around her, watching her with their enormous black eyes, supporting her, caressing her wings, and waving their feverish antennae as though to encourage, incite, or congratulate. You may easily discover the spot where the queen shall be found by the sort of starry cockade, or oval brooch perhaps of the imposing kind our grandmothers used to wear, of which she forms the central stone. And one may mention here the curious fact that the workers always avoid turning their back on the queen. No sooner has she approached a group than they will invariably arrange themselves so as to face her with eyes and antennae, and to walk backwards before her. It is a token of respect, or of solicitude, that, unlikely as it may seem, is nevertheless constant and general. But to return to the queen. During the slight spasm that visibly accompanies the emission of an egg, one of her daughters will often throw her arms round her and appear to be whispering to her, brow pressed to brow and mouth to mouth. But the queen, in no wise disturbed by this somewhat bold demonstration, takes her time, tranquilly, calmly, wholly absorbed by the mission that would seem amorous delight to her rather than labour. And after some seconds she will rise, very quietly, take a step back, execute a slight turn on herself, and proceed to the next cell, into which she will first, before introducing her abdomen, dip her head to make sure that all is in order and that she is not laying twice in the same cell; and in the meanwhile two or three of her escort will have plunged into the cell she has quitted to see whether the work be duly accomplished, and to care for, and tenderly house, the little bluish egg she has laid.

From this moment, up to the first frosts of autumn, she does not cease laying; she lays while she is being fed, and even in her sleep, if indeed she sleeps at all, she still lays. She represents henceforth the devouring force of the future, which invades every corner of the kingdom. Step by step she pursues the unfortunate workers who are exhaustedly, feverishly erecting the cradles her fecundity demands. We have here the union of two mighty instincts; and their workings throw into light, though they leave unresolved, many an enigma of the hive.

It will happen, for instance, that the workers will distance her, and acquire a certain start; whereupon, mindful of their duties as careful housewives to provide for the bad days ahead, they hasten to fill with honey the cells they have wrested from the avidity of the species. But the queen approaches; material wealth must give way to the scheme of nature; and the distracted workers are compelled with all speed to remove the importunate treasure.

But assume them to be a whole comb ahead, and to have no longer before them her who stands for the tyranny of days they shall none of them see; we find then that they eagerly, hurriedly, build a zone of large cells, cells for males; whose construction is very much easier, and far more rapid. When the queen in her turn attains this unthankful zone, she will regretfully lay a few eggs there, then cease, pass beyond, and clamour for more workers’ cells. Her daughters obey; little by little they reduce the cells; and then the pursuit starts afresh, till at last the insatiable mother shall have traversed the whole circumference of the hive, and have returned to the first cells. These, by this time, will be empty; for the first generation will have sprung into life, soon to go forth, from their shadowy corner of birth, disperse over the neighbouring blossoms, people the rays of the sun and quicken the smiling hours; and then sacrifice themselves in their turn to the new generations that are already filling their place in the cradles.

[62]

And whom does the queen-bee obey? She is ruled by nourishment given her; for she does not take her own food, but is fed like a child by the very workers whom her fecundity harasses. And the food these workers deal out is nicely proportioned to the abundance of flowers, to the spoil brought back by those who visit the calyces. Here, then, as everywhere else in the world, one part of the circle is wrapped in darkness; here, as everywhere, it is from without, from an unknown power, that the supreme order issues; and the bees, like ourselves, obey the nameless lord of the wheel that incessantly turns on itself, and crushes the wills that have set it in motion.

Some little time back, I conducted a friend to one of my hives of glass, and showed him the movements of this wheel, which was as readily perceptible as the great wheel of a clock; showed him, in all its bareness, the universal agitation on every comb, the perpetual, frantic, bewildered haste of the nurses around the brood-cells; the living gangways and ladders formed by the makers of wax, the abounding, unceasing activity of the entire population, and their pitiless, useless effort; the ardent, feverish coming and going of all, the general absence of sleep save in the cradles alone, around which continuous labour kept watch; the denial of even the repose of death in a home which permits no illness and accords no grave; and my friend, his astonishment over, soon turned his eyes away, and in them I could read the signs of I know not what saddened fear.

And truly, underlying the gladness that we note first of all in the hive, underlying the dazzling memories of beautiful days that render it the storehouse of summer’s most precious jewels, underlying the blissful journeys that knit it so close to the flowers and to running water, to the sky, to the peaceful abundance of all that makes for beauty and happiness–underlying all these exterior joys, there reposes a sadness as deep as the eye of man can behold. And we, who dimly gaze on these things with our own blind eyes, we know full well that it is not they alone that we are striving to see, not they alone that we cannot understand, but that before us there lies a pitiable form of the great power that quickens us also.

Sad let it be, as all things in nature are sad, when our eyes rest too closely upon them. And thus it ever shall be so long as we know not her secret, know not even whether secret truly there be. And should we discover some day that there is no secret, or that the secret is monstrous, other duties will then arise that, as yet, perhaps, have no name. Let our heart, if it will, in the meanwhile repeat, “It is sad;” but let our reason be content to add, “Thus it is.” At the present hour the duty before us is to seek out that which perhaps may be hiding behind these sorrows; and, urged on by this endeavour, we must not turn our eyes away, but steadily, fixedly, watch these sorrows and study them, with a courage and interest as keen as though they were joys. It is right that before we judge nature, before we complain, we should at least ask every question that we can possibly ask.

[63]

We have seen that the workers, when free for the moment from the threatening fecundity of the queen, hasten to erect cells for provisions, whose construction is more economical and capacity greater. We have seen, too, that the queen prefers to lay in the smaller cells, for which she is incessantly clamouring. When these are wanting, however, or till they be provided, she resigns herself to laying her eggs in the large cells she finds on her road.

These eggs, though absolutely identical with those from which workers are hatched, will give birth to males, or drones. Now, conversely to what takes place when a worker is turned into queen, it is here neither the form nor the capacity of the cell that produces this change; for from an egg laid in a large cell and afterwards transferred to that of a worker (a most difficult operation, because of the microscopic minuteness and extreme fragility of the egg, but one that I have four or five times successfully accomplished) there will issue an undeniable male, though more or less atrophied. It follows, therefore, that the queen must possess the power, while laying, of knowing or determining the sex of the egg, and of adapting it to the cell over which she is bending. She will rarely make a mistake. How does she contrive, from among the myriad eggs her ovaries contain, to separate male from female, and lower them, at will, into the unique oviduct?

Here, yet again, there confronts us an enigma of the hive; and in this case one of the most unfathomable. We know that the virgin queen is not sterile; but the eggs that she lays will produce only males. It is not till after the impregnation of the nuptial flight that she can produce workers or drones at will. The nuptial flight places her permanently in possession, till death, of the spermatozoa torn from her unfortunate lover. These spermatozoa, whose number Dr. Leuckart estimates at twenty-five millions, are preserved alive in a special gland known as the spermatheca, that is situate under the ovaries, at the entrance to the common oviduct. It is imagined that the narrow aperture of the smaller cells, and the manner in which the form of this aperture compels the queen to bend forward, exercise a certain pressure upon the spermatheca, in consequence of which the spermatozoa spring forth and fecundate the egg as it passes. In the large cells this pressure would not take place, and the spermatheca would therefore not open. Others, again, believe that the queen has perfect control over the muscles that open and close the spermatheca on the vagina; and these muscles are certainly very numerous, complex, and powerful. For myself, I incline to the second of these hypotheses, though I do not for a moment pretend to decide which is the more correct; for indeed, the further we go and the more closely we study, the more plainly is it brought home to us that we merely are waifs shipwrecked on the ocean of nature; and ever and anon, from a sudden wave that shall be more transparent than others, there leaps forth a fact that in an instant confounds all we imagined we knew. But the reason of my preferring the second theory is that, for one thing, the experiments of a Bordeaux bee-keeper, M. Drory, have shown that in cases where all the large cells have been removed from the hive, the mother will not hesitate, when the moment for laying male eggs has come, to deposit these in workers’ cells; and that, inversely, she will lay workers’ eggs in cells provided for males, if she have no others at her disposal. And, further, we learn from the interesting observations of M. Fabre on the Osmiae, which are wild and olitary bees of the Gastrilegidae family, that not only does the Osmia know in advance the sex of the egg she will lay, but that this sex is “optional for the mother, who decides it in accordance with the space of which she disposes; this space being often governed by chance and not to be modified; and she will deposit a male egg here and a female there.” I shall not enter into the details of the great French entomologist’s experiments, for they are exceedingly minute, and would take us too far. But whichever be the hypothesis we prefer to accept, either will serve to explain the queen’s inclination to lay her eggs in workers’ cells, without it being necessary to credit her with the least concern for the future.

It is not impossible that this slave-mother, whom we are inclined to pity, may be indeed a great amorist, a great voluptuary, deriving a certain enjoyment, an after-taste, as it were, of her one marriage-flight, from the union of the male and female principle that thus comes to pass in her being. Here again nature, never so ingenious, so cunningly prudent and diverse, as when contriving her snares of love, will not have failed to provide a certain pleasure as a bait in the interest of the species. And yet let us pause for a moment, and not become the dupes of our own explanation. For indeed, to attribute an idea of this kind to nature, and regard that as sufficient, is like flinging a stone into an unfathomable gulf we may find in the depths of a grotto, and imagining that the sounds it creates as it falls shall answer our every question, or reveal to us aught beside the immensity of the abyss.

When we say to ourselves, “This thing is of nature’s devising; she has ordained this marvel; those are her desires that we see before us!” the fact is merely that our special attention has been drawn to some tiny manifestation of life upon the boundless surface of matter that we deem inactive, and choose to describe, with evident inaccuracy, as nothingness and death. A purely fortuitous chain of events has allowed this special manifestation to attract our attention; but a thousand others, no less interesting, perhaps, and informed with no less intelligence, have vanished, not meeting with a like good-fortune, and have lost for ever the chance of exciting our wonder. It were rash to affirm aught beside; and all that remains, our reflections, our obstinate search for the final cause, our admiration and hopes–all these in truth are no more than our feeble cry as, in the depths of the unknown, we clash against what is more unknowable still; and this feeble cry declares the highest degree of individual existence attainable for us on this mute and impenetrable surface, even as the flight of the condor, the song of the nightingale, reveal to them the highest degree of existence their species allows. But the evocation of this feeble cry, whenever opportunity offers, is none the less one of our most unmistakable duties; nor should we let ourselves be discouraged by its apparent futility.

V

THE YOUNG QUEENS

[64]

HERE let us close our hive, where we find that life is reassuming its circular movement, is extending and multiplying, to be again divided as soon as it shall attain the fulness of its happiness and strength; and let us for the last time reopen the mother-city, and see what is happening there after the departure of the swarm.

The tumult having subsided, the hapless city, that two thirds of her children have abandoned for ever, becomes feeble, empty, moribund; like a body from which the blood has been drained. Some thousands of bees have remained, however; and these, though a trifle languid perhaps, are still immovably faithful to the duty a precise destiny has laid upon them, still conscious of the part that they have themselves to play; they resume their labours, therefore, fill as best they can the place of those who have gone, remove all trace of the orgy, carefully house the provisions that have escaped pillage, sally forth to the flowers again, and keep scrupulous guard over the hostages of the future.

And for all that the moment may appear gloomy, hope abounds wherever the eye may turn. We might be in one of the castles of German legend, whose walls are composed of myriad phials containing the souls of men about to be born. For we are in the abode of life that goes before life. On all sides, asleep in their closely sealed cradles, in this infinite superposition of marvellous six-sided cells, lie thousands of nymphs, whiter than milk, who with folded arms and head bent forward await the hour of awakening. In their uniform tombs, that, isolated, become nearly transparent, they seem almost like hoary gnomes, lost in deep thought, or legions of virgins whom the folds of the shroud have contorted, who are buried in hexagonal prisms that some inflexible geometrician has multiplied to the verge of delirium.

Over the entire area that the vertical walls enclose, and in the midst of this growing world that so soon shall transform itself, that shall four or five times in succession assume fresh vestments, and then spin its own winding-sheet in the shadow, hundreds of workers are dancing and flapping their wings. They appear thus to generate the necessary heat, and accomplish some other object besides that is still more obscure; for this dance of theirs contains some extraordinary movements, so methodically conceived that they must infallibly answer some purpose which no observer has as yet, I believe, been able to divine.

A few days more, and the lids of these myriad urns–whereof a considerable hive will contain from sixty to eighty thousand–will break, and two large and earnest black eyes will appear, surmounted by antennae that already are groping at life, while active jaws are busily engaged in enlarging the opening from within. The nurses at once come running; they help the young bee to emerge from her prison, they clean her and brush her, and at the tip of their tongue present the first honey of the new life. But the bee, that has come from another world, is bewildered still, trembling and pale; she wears the feeble look of a little old man who might have escaped from his tomb, or perhaps of a traveller strewn with the powdery dust of the ways that lead unto life. She is perfect, however, from head to foot; she knows at once all that has to be known; and, like the children of the people, who learn, as it were, at their birth, that for them there shall never be time to play or to laugh, she instantly makes her way to the cells that are closed, and proceeds to beat her wings and to dance in cadence, so that she in her turn may quicken her buried sisters; nor does she for one instant pause to decipher the astounding enigma of her destiny, or her race.

[65]

The most arduous labours will, however, at first be spared her. A week must elapse from the day of her birth before she will quit the hive; she will then perform her first “cleansing flight,” and absorb the air into her tracheae, which, filling, expand her body, and proclaim her the bride of space. Thereupon she returns to the hive, and waits yet one week more; and then, with her sisters born the same day as herself, she will for the first time set forth to visit the flowers. A special emotion now will lay hold of her; one that French apiarists term the “soleil d’artifice,” but which might more rightly perhaps be called the “sun of disquiet.” For it is evident that the bees are afraid, that these daughters of the crowd, of secluded darkness, shrink from the vault of blue, from the infinite loneliness of the light; and their joy is halting, and woven of terror. They cross the threshold and pause; they depart, they return, twenty times. They hover aloft in the air, their head persistently turned to the home; they describe great soaring circles that suddenly sink beneath the weight of regret; and their thirteen thousand eyes will question, reflect, and retain the trees and the fountain, the gate and the walls, the neighbouring windows and houses, till at last the aerial course whereon their return shall glide have become as indelibly stamped in their memory as though it were marked in space by two lines of steel.

[66]

A new mystery confronts us here, which we shall do well to challenge; for though it reply not, its silence still will extend the field of our conscious ignorance, which is the most fertile of all that our activity knows. How do the bees contrive to find their way back to the hive that they cannot possibly see, that is hidden, perhaps, by the trees, that in any event must form an imperceptible point in space? How is it that if taken in a box to a spot two or three miles from their home, they will almost invariably succeed in finding their way back?

Do obstacles offer no barrier to their sight; do they guide themselves by certain indications and landmarks; or do they possess that peculiar, imperfectly understood sense that we ascribe to the swallows and pigeons, for instance, and term the “sense of direction”? The experiments of J. H. Fabre, of Lubbock, and, above all, of Romanes (Nature, 29 Oct. 1886) seem to establish that it is not this strange instinct that guides them. I have, on the other hand, more than once noticed that they appear to pay no attention to the colour or form of the hive. They are attracted rather by the ordinary appearance of the platform on which their home reposes, by the position of the entrance, and of the alighting-board. But this even is merely subsidiary; were the front of the hive to be altered from top to bottom, during the workers’ absence, they would still unhesitatingly direct their course to it from out the far depths of the horizon; and only when confronted by the unrecognisable threshold would they seern for one instant to pause. Such experiments as lie in our power point rather to their guiding themselves by an extraordinarily minute and precise appreciation of landmarks. It is not the hive that they seem to remember, but its position, calculated to the minutest fraction, in its relation to neighbouring objects. And so marvellous is this appreciation, so mathematically certain, so profoundly inscribed in their memory, that if, after five months’ hibernation in some obscure cellar, the hive, when replaced on the platform, should be set a little to right or to left of its former position, all the workers, on their return from the earliest flowers, will infallibly steer their direct and unwavering course to the precise spot that it filled the previous year; and only after some hesitation and groping will they discover the door which stands not now where it once had stood. It is as though space had preciously preserved, the whole winter through, the indelible track of their flight: as though the print of their tiny, laborious footsteps, still lay graven in the sky.

If the hive be displaced, therefore, many bees will lose their way; except in the case of their having been carried far from their former home, and finding the country completely transformed that they had grown to know perfectly within a radius of two or three miles; for then, if care be taken to warn them, by means of a little gangway connecting with the alighting-board, at the entrance to the hive, that some change has occurred, they will at once proceed to seek new bearings and create fresh landmarks.

[67]

And now let us return to the city that is being repeopled, where myriad cradles are incessantly opening, and the solid walls even appear to be moving. But this city still lacks a queen. Seven or eight curious structures arise from the centre of one of the combs, and remind us, scattered as they are over the surface of the ordinary cells, of the circles and protuberances that appear so strange on the photographs of the moon. They are a species of capsule, contrived of wrinkled wax or of inclined glands, hermetically sealed, which fills the place of three or four workers’ cells. As a rule, they are grouped around the same point; and a numerous guard keep watch, with singular vigilance and restlessness, over this region that seems instinct with an indescribable prestige. It is here that the mothers are formed. In each one of these capsules, before the swarm departs, an egg will be placed by the mother, or more probably–though as to this we have no certain knowledge–by one of the workers; an egg that she will have taken from some neighbouring cell, and that is absolutely identical with those from which workers are hatched.

From this egg, after three days, a small larva will issue, and receive a special and very abundant nourishment; and henceforth we are able to follow, step by step, the movements of one of those magnificently vulgar methods of nature on which, were we dealing with men, we should bestow the august name of fatality. The little larva, thanks to. this regimen, assumes an exceptional development; and in its ideas, no less than in its body, there ensues so considerable a change that the bee to which it will give birth might almost belong to an entirely different race of insects.

Four or five years will be the period of her life, instead of the six or seven weeks of the ordinary worker. Her abdomen will be twice as long, her colour more golden, and clearer; her sting will be curved, and her eyes have seven or eight thousand facets instead of twelve or thirteen thousand. Her brain will be smaller, but she will possess enormous ovaries, and a special organ besides, the spermatheca, that will render her almost an hermaphrodite. None of the instincts will be hers that belong to a life of toil; she will have no brushes, no pockets wherein to secrete the wax, no baskets to gather the pollen. The habits, the passions, that we regard as inherent in the bee, will all be lacking in her. She will not crave for air, or the light of the sun; she will die without even once having tasted a flower. Her existence will pass in the shadow, in the midst of a restless throng; her sole occupation the indefatigable search for cradles that she must fill. On the other hand she alone will know the disquiet of love. Not even twice, it may be, in her life shall she look on the light–for the departure of the swarm is by no means inevitable; on one occasion only, perhaps, will she make use of her wings, but then it will be to fly to her lover. It is strange to see so many things–organs, ideas, desires, habits, an entire destiny–depending, not on a germ, which were the ordinary miracle of the plant, the animal, and man, but on a curious inert substance: a drop of honey.*

*It is generally admitted to-day that workers and queens, after the hatching of the egg, receive the same nourishment,–a kind of milk, very rich in nitrogen, that a special gland in the nurses’ head secretes. But after a few days the worker larvae are weaned, and put on a coarser diet of honey and pollen; whereas the future queen, until she be fully developed, is copiously fed on the precious milk known as “royal jelly.”

[68]

About a week has passed since the departure of the old queen. The royal nymphs asleep in the capsules are not all of the same age, for it is to the interest of the bees that the births should be nicely gradationed, and take place at regular intervals, in accordance with their possible desire for a second swarm, a third, or even a fourth. The workers have for some hours now been actively thinning the walls of the ripest cell, while the young queen, from within, has been simultaneously gnawing the rounded lid of her prison. And at last her head appears; she thrusts herself forward; and, with the help of the guardians who hasten eagerly to her, who brush her, caress her, and clean her, she extricates herself altogether and takes her first steps on the comb. At the moment of birth she too, like the workers, is trembling and pale, but after ten minutes or so her legs become stronger, and a strange restlessness seizes her; she feels that she is not alone, that her kingdom has yet to be conquered, that close by pretenders are hiding; and she eagerly paces the waxen walls in search of her rivals. But there intervene here the mysterious decisions and wisdom of instinct, of the spirit of the hive, or of the assembly of workers. The most surprising feature of all, as we watch these things happening before us in a hive of glass, is the entire absence of hesitation, of the slightest division of opinion. There is not a trace of discussion or discord. The atmosphere of the city is one of absolute unanimity, preordained, which reigns over all; and every one of the bees would appear to know in advance the thought of her sisters. And yet this moment is the gravest, the most vital, in their entire history. They have to choose between three or four courses whose results, in the distant future, will be totally different; which, too, the slightest accident may render disastrous. They have to reconcile the multiplication of species–which is their passion, or innate duty–with the preservation of the hive and its people. They will err at times; they will successively send forth three or four swarms, thereby completely denuding the mother-city; and these swarms, too feeble to organise, will succumb, it may be, at the approach of winter, caught unawares by this climate of ours, which is different far from their original climate, thatthe bees, notwithstanding all, have never forgotten. In such cases they suffer from what is known as “swarming fever;” a condition wherein life, as in ordinary fever, reacting too ardently on itself, passes its aim, completes the circle, and discovers only death.

[69]

Of all the decisions before them there is none that would seem imperative; nor can man, if content to play the part of spectator only, foretell in the slightest degree which one the bees will adopt. But that the most careful deliberation governs their choice is proved by the fact that we are able to influence, or even determine it, by for instance reducing or enlarging the space we accord them; or by removing combs full of honey, and setting up, in their stead, empty combs which are well supplied with workers’ cells.

The question they have to consider is not whether a second or third swarm shall be immediately launched,–for in arriving at such a decision they would merely be blindly and thoughtlessly yielding to the caprice or temptation of a favourable moment,–but the instantaneous, unanimous adoption of measures that shall enable them to issue a second swarm or “cast” three or four days after the birth of the first queen, and a third swarm three days after the departure of the second, with this first queen at their head. It must be admitted, therefore, that we discover here a perfectly reasoned system, and a mature combination of plans extending over a period considerable indeed when compared with the brevity of the bee’s existence.

These measures concern the care of the youthful queens who still lie immured in their waxen prisons. Let us assume that the “spirit of the hive “has pronounced against the despatch of a second swarm. Two courses still remain open. The bees may permit the first-born of the royal virgins, the one whose birth we have witnessed, to destroy her sister-enemies; or they may elect to wait till she have performed the perilous ceremony known as the “nuptial flight,” whereon the nation’s future depends. The immediate massacre will be authorised often, and often denied; but in the latter case it is of course not easy for us to pronounce whether the bees’ decision be due to a desire for a second swarm, or to their recognition of the dangers attending the nuptial flight; for it will happen at times that, on account of the weather unexpectedly becoming less favourable, or for some other reason we cannot divine, they will suddenly change their mind, renounce the cast that they had decreed, and destroy the royal progeny they had so carefully preserved. But at present we will suppose that they have determined to dispense with a second swarm, and that they accept the risks of the nuptial flight. Our young queen hastens towards the large cradles, urged on by her great desire, and the guard make way before her. Listening only to her furious jealousy, she will fling herself on to the first cell she comes across, madly strip off the wax with her teeth and claws, tear away the cocoon that carpets the cell, and divest the sleeping princess of every covering. If her rival should be already recognisable, the queen will turn so that her sting may enter the capsule, and will frantically stab it with her venomous weapon until the victim perish. She then becomes calmer, appeased by the death that puts a term to the hatred of every creature; she withdraws her sting, hurries to the adjoining cell, attacks it and opens it, passing it by should she find in it only an imperfect larva or nymph; nor does she pause till, at last, exhausted and breathless, her claws and teeth glide harmless over the waxen walls.

The bees that surround her have calmly watched her fury, have stood by, inactive, moving only to leave her path clear; but no sooner has a cell been pierced and laid waste than they eagerly flock to it, drag out the corpse of the ravished nymph, or the still living larva, and thrust it forth from the hive, thereupon gorging themselves with the precious royal jelly that adheres to the sides of the cell. And finally, when the queen has become too weak to persist in her passion, they will themselves complete the massacre of the innocents; and the sovereign race, and their dwellings, will all disappear.

This is the terrible hour of the hive; the only occasion, with that of the more justifiable execution of the drones, when the workers suffer discord and death to be busy amongst them; and here, as often in nature, it is the favoured of love who attract to themselves the most extraordinary shafts of violent death.

It will happen at times that two queens will be hatched simultaneously, the occurrence being rare, however, for the bees take special care to prevent it. But whenever this does take place, the deadly combat will begin the moment they emerge from their cradles; and of this combat Huber was the first to remark an extraordinary feature. Each time, it would seem that the queens, in their passes, present their chitrinous cuirasses to each other in such a fashion that the drawing of the sting would prove mutually fatal; one might almost believe that, even as a god or goddess was wont to interpose in the combats of the Iliad, so a god or a goddess, the divinity of the race, perhaps, interposes here; and the two warriors, stricken with simultaneous terror, divide and fly, to meet shortly after and separate again should the double disaster once more menace the future of their people; till at last one of them shall succeed in surprising her clumsier or less wary rival, and in killing her without risk to herself. For the law of the race has called for one sacrifice only.

The cradles having thus been destroyed and the rivals all slain, the young queen is accepted by her people; but she will not truly reign over them, or be treated as was her mother before her, until the nuptial flight be accomplished; for until she be impregnated the bees will hold her but lightly, and render most passing homage. Her history, however, will rarely be as uneventful as this, for the bees will not often renounce their desire for a second swarm. In that case, as before, quick with the same desires, the queen will approach the royal cells; but instead of meeting with docile servants who second her efforts, she will find her path blocked by a numerous and hostile guard. In her fury, and urged on by her fixed idea, she will endeavour to force her way through, or to outflank them; but everywhere sentinels are posted to protect the sleeping princesses. She persists, she returns to the charge, to be repulsed with ever increasing severity, to be somewhat roughly handled even, until at last she begins vaguely to understand that these little inflexible workers stand for a law before which that law must bend whereby she is inspired.

And at last she goes, and wanders from comb to comb, her unsatisfied wrath finding vent in a war-song, or angry complaint, that every bee-keeper knows; resembling somewhat the note of a distant trumpet of silver; so intense, in its passionate feebleness, as to be clearly audible, in the evening especially, two or three yards from the double walls of the most carefully enclosed hive.

Upon the workers this royal cry has a magical effect. It terrifies them, it induces a kind of respectful stupor; and when the queen sends it forth, as she halts in front of the cells whose approach is denied her, the guardians who have but this moment been hustling her, pushing her back, will at once desist, and wait, with bent head, till the cry shall have ceased to resound. Indeed, some believe that it is thanks to the prestige of this cry, which the Sphinx Atropos imitates, that the latter is able to enter the hive, and gorge itself with honey, without the least molestation on the part of the bees.

For two or three days, sometimes even for five, this indignant lament will be heard, this challenge that the queen addresses to her well protected rivals. And as these in their turn develop, in their turn grow anxious to see the light, they too set to work to gnaw the lids of their cells. A mighty disorder would now appear to threaten the republic. But the genius of the hive, at the time that it formed its decision, was able to foretell every consequence that might ensue; and the guardians have had their instructions: they know exactly what must be done, hour by hour, to meet the attacks of a foiled instinct, and conduct two opposite forces to a successful issue. They are fully aware that if the young queens should escape who now clamour for birth, they would fall into the hands of their elder sister, by this time irresistible, who would destroy them one by one. The workers, therefore, will pile on fresh layers of wax in proportion as the prisoner reduces, from within, the walls of her tower; and the impatient princess will ardently persist in her labour, little suspecting that she has to deal with an enchanted obstacle, that rises ever afresh from its ruin. She hears the war-cry of her rival; and already aware of her royal duty and destiny, although she has not yet looked upon life, nor knows what a hive may be, she answers the challenge from within the depths of her prison. But her cry is different; it is stifled and hollow, for it has to traverse the walls of a tomb; and, when night is falling, and noises are hushed, and high over all there reigns the silence of the stars, the apiarist who nears these marvellous cities and stands, questioning, at their entrance, recognises and understands the dialogue that is passing between the wandering queen and the virgins in prison.

[72]

To the young princesses, however, this prolonged reclusion is of material benefit; for when they at last are freed they have grown mature and vigorous, and are able to fly. But during this period of waiting the strength of the first queen has also increased, and is sufficient now to enable her to face the perils of the voyage. The time has arrived, therefore, for the departure of the second swarm, or “cast,” with the first-born of the queens at its head. No sooner has she gone than the workers left in the hive will set one of the prisoners free; and she will evince the same murderous desires, send forth the same cries of anger, until, at last, after three or four days, she will leave the hive in her turn, at the head of the tertiary swarm; and so in succession, in the case of “swarming fever,” till the mother-city shall be completely exhausted.

Swammerdam cites a hive that, through its swarms and the swarms of its swarms, was able in a single season to found no less than thirty colonies.

Such extraordinary multiplication is above all noticeable after disastrous winters; and one might almost believe that the bees, forever in touch with the secret desires of nature, are conscious of the dangers that menace their race. But at ordinary times this fever will rarely occur in a strong and well-governed hive. There are many that swarm only once; and some, indeed, not at all.

After the second swarm the bees, as a rule, will renounce further division, owing either to their having observed the excessive feebleness of their own stock, or to the prudence urged upon them by threatening skies. In that case they will allow the third queen to slaughter the captives; ordinary life will at once be resumed, and pursued with the more ardour for the reason that the workers are all very young, that the hive is depopulated and impoverished, and that there are great voids to fill before the arrival of winter.

[73]

The departure of the second and third swarms resembles that of the first, and the conditions are identical, with the exception that the bees are fewer in number, less circumspect, and lacking in scouts; and also that the young and virgin queen, being unencumbered and ardent, will fly much further, and in the first stage lead the swarm to a considerable distance from the hive. The conduct of these second and third migrations will be far more rash, and their future more problematical. The queen at their head, the representative of the future, has not yet been impregnated. Their entire destiny depends on the ensuing nuptial flight. A passing bird, a few drops of rain, a mistake, a cold wind–any one of these may give rise to irremediable disaster. Of this the bees are so well aware that when the young queen sallies forth in quest of her lover, they often will abandon the labours they have begun, will forsake the home of a day that already is dear to them, and accompany her in a body, dreading to let her pass out of their sight, eager, as they form closely around her, and shelter her beneath their myriad devoted wings, to lose themselves with her, should love cause her to stray so far from the hive that the as yet unfamiliar road of return shall grow blurred and hesitating in every memory.

[74]

But so potent is the law of the future that none of these uncertainties, these perils of death, will cause a single bee to waver. The enthusiasm displayed by the second and third swarms is not less than that of the first. No sooner has the mother-city pronounced its decision than a battalion of workers will flock around each dangerous young queen, eager to follow her fortunes, to accompany her on the voyage where there is so much to lose, and so little to gain beyond the desire of a satisfied instinct. Whence do they derive the energy we ourselves never possess, whereby they break with the past as though with an enemy? Who is it selects from the crowd those who shall go forth, and declares who shall remain? No special class divides those who stay from those who wander abroad; it will be the younger here and the elder there; around each queen who shall never return veteran foragers jostle tiny workers, who for the first time shall face the dizziness of the blue. Nor is the proportionate strength of a swarm controlled by chance or accident, by the momentary dejection or transport of an instinct, thought, or feeling. I have more than once tried to establish a relation between the number of bees composing a swarm and the number of those that remain; and although the difficulties of this calculation are such as to preclude anything approaching mathematical precision, I have at least been able to gather that this relation–if we take into account the brood-cells, or in other words the forthcoming births–is sufficiently constant to point to an actual and mysterious reckoning on the part of the genius of the hive.

[75]

We will not follow these swarms on their numerous, and often most complicated, adventures. Two swarms, at times, will join forces; at others, two or three of the imprisoned queens will profit by the confusion attending the moment of departure to elude the watchfulness of their guardians and join the groups that are forming. Occasionally, too, one of the young queens, finding herself surrounded by males, will cause herself to be impregnated in the swarming flight, and will then drag all her people to an extraordinary height and distance. In the practice of apiculture these secondary and tertiary swarms are always returned to the mother-hive. The queens will meet on the comb; the workers will gather around and watch their combat; and, when the stronger has overcome the weaker they will then, in their ardour for work and hatred of disorder, expel the corpses, close the door on the violence of the future, forget the past, return to their cells, and resume their peaceful path to the flowers that await them.

[ 76 ]

We will now, in order to simplify matters, return to the queen whom the bees have permitted to slaughter her sisters, and resume the account of her adventures. As I have already stated, this massacre will be often prevented, and often sanctioned, at times even when the bees apparently do not intend to issue a second swarm; for we notice the same diversity of political spirit in the different hives of an apiary as in the different human nations of a continent. But it is clear that the bees will act imprudently in giving their consent; for if the queen should die, or stray in the nuptial flight, it will be impossible to fill her place, the workers’ larvae having passed the age when they are susceptible of royal transformation. Let us assume, however, that the imprudence has been committed; and behold our first-born, therefore, unique sovereign, and recognised as such in the spirit of her people. But she is still a virgin. To become as was the mother before her, it is essential that she should meet the male within the first twenty days of her life. Should the event for some reason be delayed beyond this period, her virginity becomes irrevocable. And yet we have seen that she is not sterile, virgin though she be. There confronts us here the great mystery–or precaution–of Nature, that is known as parthenogenesis, and is common to a certain number of insects, such as the aphides, the lepidoptera of the Psyche genus, the hymenoptera of the Cynipede family, etc. The virgin queen is able to lay; but from all the eggs that she will deposit in the cells, be these large or small, there will issue males alone; and as these never work, as they live at the expense of the females, as they never go foraging except on their own account, and are generally incapable of providing for their subsistence, the result will be, at the end of some weeks, that the last exhausted worker will perish, and the colony be ruined and totally annihilated. The queen, we have said, will produce thousands of drones; and each of these will possess millions of the spermatozoa whereof it is impossible that a single one can have penetrated into the organism of the mother. That may not be more astounding, perhaps, than a thousand other and analogous phenomena; and, indeed, when we consider these problems, and more especially those of generation, the marvellous and the unexpected confront us so constantly–occurring far more frequently, and above all in far less human fashion, than in the most miraculous fairy stories–that after a time astonishment becomes so habitual with us that we almost cease to wonder. The fact, however, is sufficiently curious to be worthy of notice. But, on the other hand, how shall we explain to ourselves the aim that nature can have in thus favouring the valueless drones at the cost of the workers who are so essential? Is she afraid lest the females might perhaps be induced by their intellect unduly to limit the number of their parasites, which, destructive though they be, are still necessary for the preservation of the race? Or is it merely an exaggerated reaction against the misfortune of the unfruitful queen? Can we have here one of those blind and extreme precautions which, ignoring the cause of the evil, overstep the remedy; and, in the endeavour to prevent an unfortunate accident, bring about a catastrophe? In reality–though we must not forget that the natural, primitive reality is different: from that of the present, for in the original forest the colonies might well be far more scattered than they are to-day–in reality the queen’s unfruitfulness will rarely be due to the want of males, for these are very numerous always, and will flock from afar; but rather to the rain, or the cold, that will have kept her too long in the hive, and more frequently still to the imperfect state of her wings, whereby she will be prevented from describing the high flight in the air that the organ of the male demands. Nature, however, heedless of these more intrinsic causes, is so deeply concerned with the multiplication of males, that we sometimes find, in motherless hives, two or three workers possessed of so great a desire to preserve the race that, their atrophied ovaries notwithstanding, they will still endeavour to lay; and, their organs expanding somewhat beneath the empire of this exasperated sentiment, they will succeed in depositing a few eggs in the cells; but from these eggs, as from those of the virgin mother, there will, issue only males.

[77]

Here we behold the active intervention of a superior though perhaps imprudent will, which offers irresistible obstruction to the intelligent will of a life. In the insect world such interventions are comparatively frequent, and much can be gained from their study; for this world being more densely peopled and more complex than others, certain special desires of nature are often more palpably revealed to us there; and she may even at times be detected in the midst of experiments we might almost be warranted in regarding as incomplete. She has one great and general desire, for instance, that she displays on all sides; the amelioration of each species through the triumph of the stronger. This struggle, as a rule, is most carefully organised. The hecatomb of the weak is enormous, but that matters little so long as the victors’ reward be effectual and certain. But there are cases when one might almost imagine that nature had not had time enough to disentangle her combinations; cases where reward is impossible, and the fate of the victor no less disastrous than that of the vanquished. And of such, selecting an instance that will not take us too far from our bees, I know of no instance more striking than that of the triongulins of the _Sitaris colletes._ And it will be seen that, in many details, this story is less foreign to the history of man than might perhaps be imagined.

These triongulins are the primary larvae of a parasite proper to a wild, obtuse-tongued, solitary bee, the Colletes, which builds its nest in subterranean galleries. It is their habit to lie in wait for the bee at the approach to these galleries; and then, to the number of three, four, five, or often of more, they will leap on her back, and bury themselves in her hair. Were the struggle of the weak against the strong to take place at this moment there would be no more to be said, and all would pass in accordance with universal law. But, for a reason we know not, their instinct requires, and nature has consequently ordained, that they should hold themselves tranquil so long as they remain on the back of the bee. They patiently bide their time while she visits the flowers, and constructs and provisions her cells. But no sooner has an egg been laid than they all spring upon it; and the innocent colletes carefully seals down her cell, which she has duly supplied with food, never suspecting that she has at the same time ensured the death of her offspring.

The cell has scarcely been closed when the triongulins grouped round the egg engage in the inevitable and salutary combat of natural selection. The stronger, more agile, will seize its adversary beneath the cuirass, and, raising it aloft, will maintain it for hours in its mandibles until the victim expire. But, while this fight is in progress, another of the triongulins, that had either no rival to meet, or already has conquered, takes possession of the egg and bursts it open. The ultimate victor has therefore this fresh enemy to subdue; but the conquest is easy, for the triongulin, deep in the satisfaction of its pre-natal hunger, clings obstinately to the egg, and does not even attempt to defend itself. It is quickly despatched; and the other is at last alone, and possessor of the precious egg it has won so well. It eagerly plunges its head into the opening its predecessor had made; and begins the lengthy repast that shall transform it into a perfect insect. But nature, that has decreed this ordeal of battle, has, on the other hand, established the prize of victory with such miserly precision that nothing short of an entire egg will suffice for the nourishment of a single triongulin. So that, as we are informed by M. Mayet, to whom we owe the account of these disconcerting adventures, there is lacking to our conqueror the food its last victim consumed before death; and incapable therefore of achieving the first stage of its transformation, it dies in its turn, adhering to the skin of the egg, or adding itself, in the sugary liquid, to the number of the drowned.

[78]

This case, though rarely to be followed so closely, is not unique in natural history. We have here, laid bare before us, the struggle between the conscious will of the triongulin, that seeks to live, and the obscure and general will of nature, that not only desires that the triongulin should live, but is anxious even that its life should be improved, and fortified, to a degree beyond that to which its own will impels it. But, through some strange inadvertence, the amelioration nature imposes suppresses the life of even the fittest, and the Sitaris Colletes would have long since disappeared had not chance, acting in opposition to the desires of nature, permitted isolated individuals to escape from the excellent and far-seeing law that ordains on all sides the triumph of the stronger.

Can this mighty power err, then, that seems unconscious to us, but necessarily wise, seeing that the life she organises and maintains is forever proving her to be right? Can feebleness at times overcome that supreme reason, which we are apt to invoke when we have attained the limits of our own? And if that be so, by whom shall this feebleness be set right?

But let us return to that special form of her resistless intervention that we find in parthenogenesis. And we shall do well to remember that, remote as the world may seem in which these problems confront us, they do indeed yet concern ourselves very nearly. Who would dare to affirm that no interventions take place in the sphere of man–interventions that may be more hidden, but not the less fraught with danger? And in the case before us, which is right, in the end,–the insect, or nature? What would happen if the bees, more docile perhaps, or endowed with a higher intelligence, were too clearly to understand the desires of nature, and to follow them to the extreme; to multiply males to infinity, seeing that nature is imperiously calling for males? Would they not risk the destruction of their species? Are we to believe that there are intentions in nature that it is dangerous to understand too clearly, fatal to follow with too much ardour; and that it is one of her desires that we should not divine, and follow, all her desires? Is it not possible that herein there may lie one of the perils of the human race? We too are aware of unconscious forces within us, that would appear to demand the reverse of what our intellect urges. And this intellect of ours, that, as a rule, its own boundary reached, knows not whither to go–can it be well that it should join itself to these forces, and add to them its unexpected weight?

[79]

Have we the right to conclude, from the dangers of parthenogenesis, that nature is not always able to proportion the means to the end; and that what she intends to preserve is preserved at times by means of precautions she has to contrive against her own precautions, and