“Gallis mella dabunt, Hispanis spicula figent.”
To this a Spaniard is said to have subjoined,
“Spicula si figant, emorientur apes.”
To close the series, and to show his universal paternal regard towards his flock, Pope Urban is made to add the following distich:
“Cunctis mella dabunt, et nullis spicula figent,
Spicula rex[M] etenim figere nescit apum.”
[M] The ancients supposed the sovereign of the bees to be a male.
This caution of the queens is never more conspicuously evinced than in their combats with each other, for they instantly separate if there be any danger of mutual destruction from the darting forth of their stings. Huber gives a striking instance of this. Two queens in one of his hives having left their cells at nearly the same instant, rushed together with great apparent fury. The antennæ of each were seized by the teeth of the other, and the head, breast, and belly of both were mutually opposed. Finding themselves however thus dangerously situated, and their curved extremities on the point of meeting, each disengaged itself and flew away; when the other bees, who had before receded, to make a clear arena for the combatants, drove them together again. This was done repeatedly, till at last the stronger queen, seizing the other’s wing, and curling her extremities under her belly, inflicted a mortal sting.
I think this observation of Huber puts a negative upon Dr. Evans’s last question, and to assent to his first would I apprehend raise her majesty too high in the scale of existence. I believe we must here, as in many other similar cases, acknowledge our ignorance, and refer the proceeding to instinct.
We have seen that where there is more than one native queen in a hive, there is always a combat between them, terminating in the death of all but one. It was the opinion of Schirach and Riem, that if a stranger queen were introduced where there was a native one, the former would be assailed by the workers, and by them stung to death. The experiments of Huber and Dunbar discountenance this opinion: indeed Huber says that in the whole course of his experience he never knew more than one instance of a queen’s being stung by a worker, and that was wholly unintentional.
But though the experiments to which I have just alluded, produced different results from what we were led to expect by Schirach and Riem, yet those of Huber did not correspond with those of Dunbar. The former introduced two stranger queens into hives containing native queens; of the latter, one was fertile the other a virgin,—the former were both fertile. Each of these introductions led to a single combat between the queens, and each terminated in the death of the stranger. The latter gentleman also on two occasions introduced stranger queens to the queens regnant, in his mirror-hive; but in neither case were they stung to death, either by the queen or workers, but merely surrounded and confined by the latter, and by that confinement either suffocated or starved to death. Schirach and Riem had probably witnessed similar conduct on the part of the workers, and were no doubt led thereby to conjecture that they dispatched the queens with their stings.