[F] Kirby and Spence.
The young bees break their envelope with their teeth, and, assisted at first by the working-bees, proceed to cleanse themselves from the moisture and exuviæ with which they were surrounded: this operation being completed, they begin to exercise their intended functions, and in a few minutes are gathering provision in the fields, loading “in life’s first hour the hollow’d thigh.” M. Maraldi assures us that he has “seen bees loaded with two large balls of wax, returning to the hive, the same day they became bees.” “We have seen her,“ says Wildman, ”the same day issue from the cell, and return from the fields loaded with wax, like the rest.“ The error of Maraldi and Wildman in using the term wax instead of pollen, does not at all affect the accuracy of their observations. As soon as the young insect has been licked clean and regaled with a little honey by its companions, the latter clean out the cell, preparatory to its being re-occupied by a new tenant or with honey.
With respect to the cocoons spun by the different larvæ, both workers and drones spin complete cocoons, or inclose themselves on every side: royal larvæ construct only imperfect cocoons, open behind, and enveloping only the head, thorax, and first ring of the abdomen; and Huber concludes, without any hesitation, that the final cause of their forming only incomplete cocoons is that they may thus be exposed to the mortal sting of the first hatched queen, whose instinct leads her instantly to seek the destruction of those who would soon become her rivals. If the royal larvæ spun complete cocoons, the stings of the queens regnant might be so entangled in their silken meshes, as to be with difficulty disengaged from them. “Such,” says Huber, “is the instinctive enmity of young queens to each other, that I have seen one of them, immediately on its emergence from the cell, rush to those of its sisters, and tear to pieces even the imperfect larvæ.”
A curious circumstance occurs with respect to the hatching of the queen-bee. When the pupa or nymph is about to change into the perfect insect, the bees render the cover of the cell thinner, by gnawing away part of the wax; and with so much nicety do they perform this operation that the cover at last becomes pellucid, owing to its extreme thinness, thus facilitating the exit of the fly. After the transformation is complete, the young queens would, in common course, immediately emerge from their cells, as workers and drones do; but the former always keep the royal infants prisoners for some days, supplying them in the mean time with honey for food, a small hole being made in the door of each cell, through which the confined bee extends its proboscis to receive it. The royal prisoners continually utter a kind of song, the modulations of which are said to vary. Vide [Chapter XV]. Huber heard a young princess in her cell emit a very distinct sound or clacking, consisting of several monotonous notes in rapid succession, and he supposes the working bees to ascertain, by the loudness of these tones, the ripeness of their queens. Huber has suggested that the cause of this temporary imprisonment may possibly be to enable the young queens to fly away at the instant they are liberated.
The queen is a good deal harassed by the other bees, on her liberation. This has been attributed to their wishing to impel her to go off with a swarm as soon as possible, but this notion is probably erroneous; it certainly is so if Huber be correct, in saying that the swarms are always accompanied by the older queens. The queen has the power of instantly putting a stop to their worrying, by uttering a peculiar noise, which has been called the voice of sovereignty. Bonner however declares that he never could observe in the queen anything like an exercise of sovereignty. But Huber’s statement was not founded upon a solitary instance; he heard the sound on various occasions, and witnessed the striking effect which it always produced. On one occasion, a queen having escaped the vigilance of her guards and sprung from the cell, was, on her approach to the royal embryos, pulled, bitten and chased by the other bees. But standing with her thorax against a comb and crossing her wings upon her back, keeping them in motion, but not unfolding them, she emitted a particular sound, when the bees became, as it were, paralysed and remained motionless. Taking advantage of this dread, she rushed to the royal cells; but the sound having ceased as she prepared to ascend, the guardians of the cells instantly took courage and fairly drove her away. This voice of sovereignty, as it has been called, resembles that which is made by young queens before they are liberated from their cells; it is a very distinct kind of clicking, composed of many notes in the same key, which follow each other rapidly. The sound accompanied by the attitude just described, always produces a paralysing effect upon the bees.
Bees, when deprived of their queen, have the power of selecting one or more grubs of workers, and converting them into queens. To effect this, each of the promoted grubs has a royal cell or cradle formed for it, by having three contiguous common cells thrown into one; two of the three grubs that occupy those cells are sacrificed, and the remaining one is liberally fed with royal jelly. This royal jelly is a pungent food prepared by the working bees, exclusively for the purpose of feeding such of the larvæ as are destined to become candidates for the honours of royalty, whether it be their lot to assume them or not. It is more stimulating than the food of ordinary bees, has not the same mawkish taste, and is evidently acescent. The royal larvæ are supplied with it rather profusely, and there is always some of it left in the cell, after their transformation. Schirach, who was secretary to the Apiarian Society in Upper Lusatia and vicar of Little Bautzen, may be regarded as the discoverer, or rather as the promulgator of this fact; and his experiments, which were also frequently repeated by other members of the Lusatian Society, have been amply confirmed by those of Huber and Bonner. Mr. Keys was a violent sceptic upon this subject (See his communications to the Bath Society); so likewise was Mr. Hunter (Vide Philosophical Transactions). But notwithstanding the criticisms and ridicule of the former, and the sarcastic strictures of the latter, the sex of workers is now established beyond all doubt. The fact is said to have been known long before Schirach wrote: M. Vogel and Signor Monticelli, a Neapolitan professor, have both asserted this; the former states it to have been known upwards of fifty years, the latter a much longer period; he says that the Greeks and Turks in the Ionian Islands are well acquainted with it, and that in the little Sicilian island of Favignana, the art of producing queens has been known from very remote antiquity; he even thinks that it was no secret to the Greeks and Romans, though, as Messrs. Kirby and Spence observe, had the practice been common, it would surely have been noticed by Aristotle or Pliny. The result of Schirach’s experiments was that all workers were originally females, but that their organs of generation were obliterated, merely because the germs of them were not developed; their being fed and treated in a particular manner, in their infancy or worm state, being necessary, in his opinion, to effect that development. Subsequent experiments conducted under the auspices of Huber, have shown, however, that the organs are not entirely obliterated.
Huber has been regarded as a man of a very vivid imagination; and as his eye-sight was defective, he was obliged to rely very much upon the reports of Francis Burnens, his assistant; on both which accounts other apiarian writers have thrown some distrust upon his statements. Huish may be reckoned among the number; he has also made some observations upon Schirach’s theory, and treated it with much petulance and ridicule. In answer to him and all other cavillers, I shall detail an experiment made by Mr. Dunbar, in his mirror hive. In July, when the hive had become filled with comb and bees, and well stored with honey; and when the queen was very fertile, laying a hundred eggs a-day, Mr. D. opened the hive and took her majesty away. The bees laboured for eighteen hours before they appeared to miss her; but no sooner was the loss discovered than all was agitation and tumult; and they rushed in crowds to the door, as if swarming. On the following morning he observed that they had founded five queen cells, in the usual way under such circumstances; and in the course of the same afternoon, four more were founded, in a part of the comb where there were only eggs a day or two old. On the fourteenth day from the old queen’s removal, a young queen emerged and proceeded towards the other royal cells, evidently with a murderous intent. She was immediately pulled away by the workers, with violence, and this conduct on their part was repeated as often as the queen renewed her destructive purpose. At every repulse she appeared sulky, and cried peep peep, one of the unhatched queens responding, but in a somewhat hoarser tone. (This circumstance affords an explanation of the two different sounds which are heard, prior to the issuing of second swarms.) On the afternoon of the same day, a second queen was hatched; she immediately buried herself in a cluster of bees. Next morning Mr. D. observed a hot pursuit of the younger queen by the elder, but being called away, on his return half an hour afterwards, the former was dying on the floor, no doubt the victim of the other. Huber has stated that these artificial queens are mute; but the circumstance noticed by Mr. Dunbar of the two queens, just referred to, having answered each other, disproves that statement. Contrary also to the experience of Huber, Mr. D. found that the cells of artificial queens were surrounded by a guard. I have just adverted to the protection which they afforded to the royal cells, when assailed by the first hatched queen.
That the working bees are females is clear from the circumstance of their being known occasionally to lay eggs. This fact was first noticed by Riem, and was afterwards confirmed by the experiments of Huber, whose assistant, on one occasion seized a fertile worker in the very act of laying. It is a remarkable fact that these fertile workers never lay any but drones’ eggs. This uninterrupted laying of drones’ eggs was noticed by the Lusatian observers, as well as by the naturalist of the Palatinate. Bonnet, on referring to this fact, supposes there must have been small queens mixed with the workers upon which the experiments were made, whose office it was to lay male eggs in all hives; for neither he nor the before-named observers imagined that the workers were ever fertile, though from the oft repeated experiments, just alluded to, they must have regarded them as females. Probably the fertility of these workers is occasioned by some royal jelly being casually dropped into their cells, when grubs, as they uniformly issue from cells adjoining those inhabited by grubs, that have been raised from the plebeian to the royal rank; of course therefore they are never found in any hives but those which have had the misfortune to lose their queen. Fertile workers appear smaller in the belly and more slender in the body than sterile workers, and this is the only external difference between them.
If any further proof were required to establish the opinion that working bees are females, the question has been set at rest for ever, by the dissections of Miss Jurine, daughter of the distinguished naturalist of Geneva: what had eluded the scalpel and the microscope of that penetrating and indefatigable naturalist Swammerdam, was reserved for the still finer hand and more dexterous dissection of a lady. Miss Jurine, by adopting a particular method of preparing the object to be examined, brought into view the rudiments of the ovaria of the common working bee: her examinations were several times repeated, and always with success: in form, situation and structure, they were found to be perfectly analogous to those of the queen-bee, excepting that no ova could be distinguished in them. M. Cuvier, however, thinks that he has observed minute chaplets in common bees, resembling those in the oviducts of queens; an additional confirmation, if any were wanted, of the opinion that workers are females whose organization is not developed. Miss Jurine undertook the delicate task to which I have just referred, at the request of M. Huber, who speaks of her as a young lady who had devoted her time and the liberal gifts of nature to similar studies, and says that she already rivalled Lyonnet and Merian; but adds, “we had soon to deplore her loss.” The research was first made to ascertain whether black bees, which, when they appear in a hive, are much persecuted, were exposed to this persecution in consequence of their sex exciting the jealousy of the queen. The success of the investigation induced this accomplished young lady to extend her dissection to the common workers, which was crowned with a result equally gratifying. Parallel instances have been observed with regard to the humble-bee, the wasp and the ant, amongst which, those that have usually been called neuters are found to be females, and when fertile, they, like the fertile workers in a bee-hive, produce males universally.
Having now traced these insects through their regular stages of egg, larva, nymph, until they become perfect bees, and having noticed the facts which show the working bees to be females, I shall advert to the more intricate and mysterious business of Impregnation. This is a subject which was long involved in obscurity, and which indeed is still clouded by some uncertainty. Schirach and Bonner stoutly denied the necessity of sexual intercourse between the queen and the drones, considering the former as a mother and yet a virgin, and Swammerdam was of the same opinion; he ascribes impregnation to a vivifying seminal aura, which is exhaled from the drones and penetrates the body of the queen. This opinion arose from his observing a very strong odour to be exhaled, at certain times, from the drones; “Hanc sententiam ratam habuit, quia organa apum propagini servientia, sexus utriusque, ritè dissecta, inter se ita disparia videbantur, ut congressus ne fieri quidem ullo pacto posset.” His opinion with respect to the vivifying influence of the seminal aura also accounted satisfactorily, to his own mind, for there being such a prodigious number of drones, as, in proportion to their number, would of course be the intensity of their peculiar odour. Reaumur very successfully combated this fanciful doctrine, and Huber has confuted it by direct experiment. Reaumur inclined to the opinion that there was a sexual intercourse, though his experiments left that question undecided. Arthur Dobbs, Esq. has given it as his opinion that the queen’s eggs were impregnated by coition with the drones, and that a renewal of the intercourse was unnecessary. He however thought that she had intercourse with several, instead of with one only, in order that there might be a sufficient deposition of sperm to impregnate all her eggs. About the beginning of the last century, Maraldi broached another hypothesis; he imagined that the eggs were fecundated by the drones, after the queen had deposited them in the cells, similarly to what takes place in the fecundation of fish-spawn. In 1777 that ingenious naturalist Mr. Debraw, who was apothecary to Addenbroke’s Hospital at Cambridge, also adopted this opinion; and even so late as the year 1817 Huish has supported the same doctrine, and I believe does so at the present time. Debraw thought he had discovered the prolific fluid of the drones, in the brood-cells, which fertilizing the eggs caused them to produce larvæ. Huber repeated the experiments of Debraw, and at first gave him credit for the reality of the discovery; but further and more minute observation convinced him that it was illusory, and that what he, as well as Debraw had taken for seminal fluid, was nothing more than light reflected from the bottoms of the cells, when illuminated by the sun’s rays. Moreover, it did not escape the acute mind of Huber, that eggs were laid and larvæ hatched, when there were no drones in existence, viz. between the months of September and April. The two hypotheses just mentioned, accounted satisfactorily, to their supporters, for the prodigious disproportion in the number of the sexes. But Huber made the experiment of confining the queen and rigidly excluding every male from a hive; nay more, he carefully examined every comb, and satisfied himself that there was neither male nymph nor worm present; and lest it should be supposed that the fertilizing fluid might be imported from other hives, he totally confined the bees, on two occasions, and still the eggs were prolific; which proves clearly that their fertility must have depended upon the previous impregnation of the queen. The analogy of wasps is indeed admitted, by Huish, to discountenance the opinion which he entertains in common with Maraldi and Debraw. The queen wasp alone, survives the winter, and deposits her first eggs in the ensuing spring in combs of her own construction. Here then impregnation must have taken place in the preceding autumn, whilst the eggs were in the ovaria. It was the opinion of Hattorf, Schirach, and probably also of Bonner, that the queen-bee impregnated herself; but this opinion is too extravagant to require serious refutation: it arose probably, from their making experiments upon queens taken indiscriminately from the hives, and which had previously been impregnated. This no doubt misled Debraw, who, without knowing it, had chosen for experiment some queens that had had commerce with the males. The experiments of Huber were made upon virgin-queens, with whose history he was acquainted from the moment of their leaving their cells. In the course of his experiments he found that the queens were never impregnated, so long as they remained in the interior of the hive; but that impregnation always takes place in the open air, at a time when the heat has induced the drones to issue from the hive; on which occasions, the queen soars high in the air, love being the motive for the only distant journey she ever takes. “The rencontre and copulation of the queen with the drone take place exterior to the hive,” says Lombard, “and whilst they are on the wing.” They are similarly constituted with the whole family of flies. A corresponding circumstance may also be noted with respect to the queen-ant; and Bonnet, in his Contemplations de la Nature, has observed that she is always impregnated whilst she is on the wing. The dragon-flies copulate as they fly through the air, in which state they have the appearance of a double animal.