“Alveos nunquam
Ultra decem annos durasse proditur.”
Pliny.
To common observers it might appear, that the lives of the bees were coeval with the foundation of the colony, presuming upon all the young bees leaving the parent stock in swarms. But I have already stated that all swarms consist of a mixture of young and old bees; the difference between them is very distinguishable, those of the present year being brown, plump, and clothed with light hairs, whilst the old ones have red hairs, notched and ragged wings, and are paler and more shrunk in their bodies.
The cases which I have related, and others of a similar kind, have led to the erroneous opinion that bees are a long-lived race. But this, as Dr. Evans has observed, is just as wise as if a stranger, contemplating a populous city, and personally unacquainted with its inhabitants, should on paying it a second visit, many years afterwards, and finding it equally populous, imagine that it was peopled by the same individuals, not one of whom might be then alive. “Such strangers are we to the honied hive, where, however quickly its generations may have passed away, the same face is presented to the beholder.”
“The race and realm from age to age remain,
And time but lengthens with new links the chain.”
Sotheby’s Georgics.
The usual term of the male’s existence is two or three months only;—I say the usual term, for his life is always cut off by violence, when no peculiar circumstances arise to render his existence any longer useful. Such circumstances having arisen, as has been before observed, ([page 44],) he may be kept alive a much longer period, for a year at least, but how much longer has not as yet been ascertained.
With respect to the queen, by comparing what has been said above, as to insects not dying till their eggs are all matured, with what has been stated in [page 31] of a single sexual union serving to impregnate all the eggs laid for the two succeeding years, it would appear that the period of her existence could not, in general, be less than two years; and Huber has proved very satisfactorily, that this is the fact: indeed he states that he has known a queen live for five years. Feburier suspects that, like the males, the queens are destroyed by the labourers, when they have fulfilled their destination. The only ground of this opinion, however, appears to be his having witnessed an attack made upon a queen by six labourers, from whom he with difficulty rescued her. Messrs. Kirby and Spence, in like manner, seem to think it not improbable that when the workers become too old to be useful to the community, they are either killed or expelled the society. Vide [page 7]. Reaumur also throws out a hint to the same purpose.