As there is a leaf-cutting ant, so, too, there is a leaf-cutting bee, but here the resemblance ends, since no thought of food or fungus enters the mind of the latter insect. Her more simple and direct object is to make the severed leaves into cells, and this she does with wonderful skill and ingenuity. The cells, which are made by rolling the pieces of leaves round within a tunnel or gallery, previously excavated in the earth, are separated from one another by a circular piece, which fits into the tube with extreme nicety, making at once the ceiling of each lower compartment and the floor of that above it. As each is finished the bee, as in the other instances, fills it with a mixture of honey and pollen, upon which she then lays an egg, and finally closes the mouth of the tunnel. The leaf principally used for the manufacture of these pretty cradles is the rose leaf, and the paste which fills them is of a rose-red colour, owing to the pollen having been collected for the most part from thistles.
The children of the leaf-cutting bee, therefore, are delicately housed, but what are they, in this respect, to those of the poppy or tapestry bee, who are born like the Byzantine princes in a “purple[[89]] chamber” made of the rich leaves of poppies? Here they lie, or crawl, in state, one to each royal apartment, which is filled, almost to the brim, with the sweet food of bees. Yet when they come forth, at last, it is not as gorgeous imperial creatures clothed in “purple and pall,” but only little ordinary-looking black bees covered all over with dirty grey hair. And their beautiful purple poppy chamber has been seen by no one—not even by themselves probably—buried as it is full three inches deep in the earth. Wallace, somewhere in his Malay Archipelago, moralises over the beautiful little kingbird of paradise, sparkling out its life amidst the forest solitudes of a remote island, unseen by human eyes, save those of savages, till once or twice, perhaps, in a century, some wandering white man, who alone is capable of appreciating its beauty, comes to bang its life out and bear away its skin. The thought of this dainty little crimson-tapestried bower lying in black darkness, like a grave beneath one’s feet, rouses a similar train of reflection in the mind, but perhaps it would do so more strongly were it associated in the same degree with ideas of sport or profitable collecting.
The carding-bee is interesting, not so much for the nest which it makes, as for the wonderful way in which it makes it—or, to express it more justly, it is more especially interesting on this account. Having either made or found a suitable cavity, these bees under-roof it with a thick thatching of moss. To carry this, bit by bit, to the place, would take them a very long time, so, instead of doing so, they stand one behind another, with their backs toward the nest, in a line that reaches from the moss to its entrance. The furthest bee then pulls out a piece with her mandibles, cards it with her fore feet, and, with the others, passes it on, beneath her body, to the second bee, who passes it to the third, the third to the fourth, and so on, all down the line, the last bee entering the nest with it. Thus these bees do with moss exactly what rats have been seen to do with eggs, when transporting them to their burrows. A most interesting anecdote of this is quoted by Romanes,[[90]] from Jesse’s Gleanings, but it does not appear to be in my edition, which I had thought was a complete one. All I can find is a bare reference to their having been known to “convey” eggs from a box, in this way—“convey the wise it call.” This is an annoying discovery, for I detest all selections, not made by myself, from Palgrave’s Golden Treasury to any man’s “Hundred Rest Books.” But if my edition is a complete one, then the thing should be looked into, for the anecdote quoted by Romanes is not there—at least it is untraceable through the index.
Like ants, bees are subject to parasites, and as some belonging to the former are ants themselves, so with bees we have the same thing, but developed to a still more striking extent; for there is no ant that I know of that lives with another which it so closely resembles that the latter is unable to distinguish it from itself. Such bees, however, there are. Some of our humble bees, for instance, go through life thus attended by a double whose existence it never for one moment suspects. The two, indeed, are linked in the closest bonds of social intimacy. Together they leave the nest, together they fly from flower to flower, together they re-enter it. Together, too, they seem to glow in industry—to emulate each other’s toil. But all the while that the true industrious bee is collecting pollen and nectar the double is only pretending to do so—or rather, let us say, seeming—and whilst the former bustles about, feeding the larvæ and making the cells, the latter only bustles about, like the shadow of a busy person on the wall. But when the true bee lays an egg, the double lays one too, almost at the same moment, and in the very same cell. Both are then hatched, together, and the two larvæ grow up in the same cradle, nourished by the same food, make their transformation side by side, and so creep forth into the nest. The two, as I say, are hardly to be distinguished one from another, yet all the while one is a real true-hearted humble bee, and the other a mere show, a stage make-up, an outer shell without any of the proper qualities inside. And the best of the joke is, that, probably, the false or cuckoo bee, as it is called, is as much deceived as its foster relatives, and imagines itself a good honest sterling member of the community. It is forced by nature to cheat, but the fraud is unconscious, and the impostor is imposed on in its turn.
Thus in the insect world we have something which can only be brought about, amongst ourselves, through a conscious disguise, by means of wigs, false moustaches, etc.—what we call an impersonation—but here is a life-long impersonation which costs the “born actor” no trouble. Why is this? What is the meaning of it? Why should one bee—or any other insect or creature—look just like another one, and yet have a Latin name of its own, which the other has no right to? Why should the individuals of one species be hardly more like each other than they are like the individuals of another species, even though—as is often the case—these two species are widely separated in the system of nature? Such are the questions to which a consideration of these cuckoo-bees, as they are called, give rise. They will be answered, if at all, in the following chapter.
CHAPTER XIX
Natural selection—Protective resemblances—A locust’s stratagem—Mock leaf-cutting ants—Flowery dissemblers—A Malay explanation—Snake-suggesting caterpillars—A prudent lizard—Inconclusive experiments—A bogus ant—Flies that live with bees—A caterpillar that dresses up—A portrait-modelling caterpillar.
EVERYBODY knows nowadays how all the different species of animals and plants, living and extinct, have come into existence. It was quite simple. All they had to do was to keep on varying. Some of them varied in a way that was good for them, some in a way that was bad. The latter died, but the others increased and multiplied, and as the process was always going on, and it is impossible to vary long without becoming changed, it happened that creatures which had started with a certain appearance got in time to have quite another one, so that they would not have been recognised by the people who used to know them, if these same people had kept alive. However, as the process was so slow that it took millions of years, and is still going on, awkward things of this sort never happened, and so, as nobody had ever seen one species of animal change into another before their eyes, they found it difficult to believe that they ever had done so; for the ordinary person says “seeing’s believing,” though he believes in all sorts of things that neither he nor anyone else ever has seen, or is ever likely to. Still, for all that, he thinks his own eyesight must be better than anyone else’s.