It is reasonable to suppose that every part of animated nature needs occasional intervals of repose. That this is the case with the bee seems evident, from the almost motionless quietude of the workers, which often occurs for fifteen or twenty minutes together, each bee inserting its head and thorax into a cell, where it might be mistaken for dead, were it not for the dilatation of the segments of its abdomen. The queen sometimes does the same in a drone’s cell, where she continues without motion a very long time, when “the workers form a circle round her, and gently brush the uncovered parts of her abdomen. The drones while reposing do not enter the cells, but cluster in the combs, and sometimes remain without stirring a limb for eighteen or twenty hours.” Huber says that he has seen the workers, even in the middle of the day, when apparently wearied with exertion, insert half their bodies into the empty cells, and remain there, as if taking a nap, for half an hour or longer; at night they regularly muster, in a sleep-like silence.
“The sun declining, through the murky air.
Home to their hives the vagrant bands repair,
There in soft slumber close their willing eyes,
And hush’d in silence, the whole nation lies.”
Murphy’s Vaniere.
The several members of a hive have very different periods of existence. The general law among insects is, that both male and female shall perish soon after sexual union; in a few days or weeks at furthest, according to the time, probably, that the female occupies in maturing and depositing her eggs. By retarding sexual union, the lives of some insects may be very much prolonged,—even ephemeræ have been kept alive by this means for seven or eight days. Annual plants, if prevented from seeding, may be rendered biennial. The bee and some other insects are exempted from this forfeiture of life after sexual union, with the exception already alluded to in [page 33]. The ancients were very deficient in knowledge upon this subject. Virgil fixes the term of a bee’s existence at seven years[Q], having probably copied from Aristotle; though Aristotle says that bees who live to an extreme old age may reach to nine or ten years. Columella [R] and Pliny[S] have been supposed to regard their existence as extending to ten years; though the language of the former applies to the existence of the community, and not to individual bees: and provided the hive be never changed, nor the combs renewed, it is not likely that any one family should have its existence prolonged beyond that period; as the accumulation of silken pellicles with which the breeding-cells are successively lined, would render them unfit for use in a very few years. In addition to the diminution of the cells by this succession of silken linings, they are also diminished further by the excrement of the larvæ, which is never cleaned out, but confined behind each lining: both together, therefore, soon render the cells unfit for use as brood-cells. Mr. Hunter found three of these layers deposited in a single season, and counted upwards of twenty in the cells of an old comb; which, upon an average of three a year, would correspond with the period fixed by the ancients; though this observation by no means proves that the hive upon which it was made, or any other, might not have had a much more protracted existence. Mr. Espinasse tells us that he once took a hive which had stood fourteen years, having found that it had become weak: it had nevertheless sent off a swarm the year previous. There is an instance or two on record, of one family having continued in the same hive for thirty years. One of these is mentioned by Reaumur, another by Mouffet. Thorley speaks of a colony having occupied the same domicile for 110 years. The spot chosen was under the leads of the study of Ludovicus Vives in Oxford: the original swarm settled there in 1520 and kept possession till 1630. Query,—may not the bees when the combs become very old and the cells much diminished in size, remove them and construct fresh ones? To those who may wish for their own satisfaction to examine the linings of a brood cell, I would observe, that Mr. Hunter’s mode of proceeding was, to soak the cell in water, till the linings were swelled, when he had no difficulty in separating and counting them: he found them separate most readily at the bottom, on account of the inclosed excrement.
“Ergo ipsas quamvis angusti terminus ævi
Excipiat, neque enim plus septima ducitur æstas.”
“Durantque, si diligenter excultæ sint, in annos decem.”
Columella.