"When noon-tide Sirius glares on high,
Young Love ascends the glowing sky,
From vein to vein swift shoots prolific fire,
And thrills each insect fibre with desire.
Thence, Nature, to fulfil thy prime decree,
Wheels round, in wanton rings, the courtier bee;
Now shyly distant, now with bolden’d air.
He woos and wins the all-complying fair:
Through fields of ether, veil’d in vap’ry gloom,
They seek, with amorous haste, the nuptial room;
As erst th’ immortal pair, on Ida’s height,
Wreath’d round their noon of joy, ambrosial night.”
Evans.
The males and the fertile females, among ants, are winged insects; the former, as in the case of drone bees, perish a short time after their amours; and the females, having alighted upon a spot suitable for the formation of a colony, cut off their own wings, as being no longer of any use to them. (Linnæus had observed that the females lost their wings a certain period after impregnation.) A domino Hunter didici, se bombinatrices sub oculos in coitu junctos, ut apud muscas mos est, vidisse. “Aculeus,” inquit, “articulo temporis ejicitur, et inter gemina insecta, dorso feminæ imponitur. Hoc situ aliquandiù manent.” In the hornet it is the same.
If the queen-bee be confined, though amid a seraglio of males, she continues barren. Prior to her flight, (which is preceded by the flight of the drones,) she reconnoitres the exterior of the hive, apparently for the purpose of recognition, and sometimes, after flying a few feet from it, returns to it again: finally she rises aloft in the air, describing in her flight horizontal circles of considerable diameter, till she is out of sight. She returns from her aërial excursion in about half an hour, with the most evident marks of fecundation. Excursions are sometimes made for a shorter period, but then she exhibits no sign of having been impregnated. It is curious that Bonner should have remarked those aërial excursions, without suspecting their object. “I have often,” says he, “seen the young queens taking an airing upon the second or third day of their age.” Yet Huish says, “It is an acknowledged tact that the queen-bee never leaves the hive, on any account whatsoever.” Perhaps Huish’s observations were made upon first swarms; and these, according to Huber, are uniformly conducted by old queens. Swammerdam also made the same observation as to first swarms being always led off by old queens. Old queens have not the same occasion to quit the hives that young ones have,—viz. to have intercourse with the drones; for, according to Huber, one impregnation is sufficient to fertilize all the eggs that are laid for two years afterwards, at least. He thinks it is sufficient to fertilize all that she lays during her whole life. This may appear, to some, an incredible period; and Huish inquires, admitting that a single act of coition be sufficient to fecundate all the eggs existing in the ovaria at the time, how those are fecundated which did not exist there? But when we consider that in the common spider, according to Audebert, the fertilizing effect continues for many years; and that the fecundation of the eggs of the female aphides or green lice, by the males of one generation, will continue for a year, passing, during that period, through nine or ten successive generations of females, the causes for doubt will, I think, be greatly diminished: at any rate we are not at liberty to reject the evidence of facts, because we cannot understand their modus operandi. With respect to the aphis, Bonnet says the influence of the male continues through five generations, but Lyonnet carried his experiments to a more extended period; and according to Messrs. Kirby and Spence, who give it “upon the authority of Mr. Wolnough of Hollesley (late of Boyton) in Suffolk, an intelligent agriculturist, and a most acute and accurate observer of nature, there may be twenty generations in a year.” Reaumur has proved that in five generations one aphis may be the progenitor of 5,904,900,000 descendants. It may be objected to me here, that the aphis is a viviparous insect, and that the experiments which prove what I have referred to, do not therefore bear upon the question. It has been ascertained, however, that they are strictly oviparous at the close of the year (one species is at all times so), at other times ovo-viviparous; and in either case the penetrating influence of the male sperm is surely still more remarkable where there has been no immediate commerce with the male, than in the direct case of the oviparous bee! It has been observed, however, that the further the female aphides are removed from the first mother, or that which had known the male, the less prolific do they become. In order to put my readers in possession of Dr. Fleming’s opinion upon this subject, I will quote what he has said in his Philosophy of Zoology. “Impregnation, in insects, appears to take place while the eggs pass a reservoir containing the sperm, situated near the termination of the oviduct in the vulva. In dissecting the female parts, in the silk-moth, says Mr. Hunter, I discovered a bag, lying on what may be called the vagina or common oviduct, whose mouth or opening was external, but it had a canal of communication betwixt it and the common oviduct. In dissecting these parts, before copulation, I found this bag empty; and when I dissected them afterwards, I found it full. (Phil. Trans. 1792. p. 186.) By the most decisive experiments, such as covering the ova of the unimpregnated moth, after exclusion, with the liquor taken from this bag, in those which had had sexual intercourse, and rendering them fertile, he demonstrated that this bag was a reservoir for the spermatic fluid, to impregnate the eggs, as they were ready for exclusion, and that coition and impregnation were not simultaneous.” Linnæus thought that there was a sexual intercourse between the queens and the drones, and he even suspected that it proved fatal to the latter. His opinion, on both these points, seems to be confirmed by the experiments of Huber; who ascertained by repeated observations on newly impregnated queens, “Fuci organum, post congressum, in corpore feminæ hæsisse, unde exitus fatalis expectandus est; ita autem accidere re verâ non liquet.” “Apum regina et mater,” says Mr. Kirby, “in sublime fertur maritum infelicem petens, qui voluptatem brevem vitâ emat.” Reaumur thought sexual union necessary to impregnation, and tried many experiments to ascertain the fact; such as confining a queen under a glass in company with drones: and these experiments were repeated by Huber. Both these naturalists witnessed the solicitations and advances of the queens towards the drones, “nihilominùs, coeuntia tempore quovis conspicere non possent.” Reaumur fancied he saw it; there is, however, very great reason to believe that he was mistaken: the queens so exposed all proved barren. Swammerdam asserted that clipping the wings of queens rendered them sterile, a fact which militates very much against his own theory of impregnation being produced by a seminal aura, but strongly confirms the theory of Huber; as in all probability the mutilating experiments of Swammerdam were made upon virgin queens, which thereby lost the power of quitting the hives. Huber found that clipping the wings of impregnated queens produced no effect upon them; it neither diminished the respectful attentions of the workers, nor interfered with their laying of eggs. Why impregnation can only take place in the open air and when the insects are on the wing, at present remains a mystery.
The young virgin-queens, generally, set out in quest of the males, the day after they are settled in their new abode, which is usually the fifth day of their existence as queens, two or three days being passed in captivity, one in the native hive after their liberation, and the fifth in the new dwelling. The ancients seem to have been very solicitous to establish for the bees a character of inviolable chastity: Pliny observes, “Apium enim coitus visus nunquam.” And Virgil endeavours to support the same opinion:
“But of all customs which the bees can boast,
’Tis this that claims our admiration most;
That none will Hymen’s softer joys approve,
Nor waste their spirits in luxurious love:
But all a long virginity maintain.
And bring forth young without a mother’s pain.”
It was the opinion of most ancient philosophers that bees derived their origin from the putrid carcases of animals. Vide [Chap. II]. Some also have supposed them to proceed from the parts of fructification in flowers. Virgil, borrowing as usual from Aristotle, among the rest:
“Well might the Bard, on fancy’s frolic wing,
Bid, from fresh flowers, enascent myriads spring,
Raise genial ferment in the slaughter’d steer.
And people thence his insect-teeming year;
A fabled race, whom no soft passions move.
The smile of duty nor the glance of love.”
Evans.
“To vindicate, in some measure, the character of the insect queen, Mr. Wildman boldly dared to stem the torrent, and revive the long forgotten idea suggested by Mr. Butler in his Feminine Monarchy, that queens produce queens only, and that the common bees are the mothers of common bees.” But all these fanciful notions must yield to the clear and decisive experiments of Huber, who has satisfactorily shown that the queen is the general mother of all; he has also resolved the causes of former mistaken opinions. Many apiarians have found a difficulty in admitting the theory of Huber, in consequence of the very great disproportion in the number of the sexes, there being only one female to several hundred males, and one impregnation being, in his opinion, all that is required to fertilize myriads of eggs. The number of drones may be considered as in accordance, in some degree, with the general profusion of nature: we find her abounding with supernumeraries in a great variety of instances, in the blossoms of trees and flowers, as well as in the relative number of one sex to the other among animals. Huber conceives that it was necessary there should be a great number of drones, that the queen might be sure of finding one, in her excursion through the expanse of the atmosphere, and run no risk of sterility.