The Children's Life of the Bee

by Maurice Maeterlinck

When the bodies of most of the bees forming the curtain have thus been adorned with ivory tablets, we shall suddenly see one of them detach herself from the crowd, and eagerly, hurriedly, clamber over the backs of the motionless crowd till she has reached the top of the dome. To this she will fix herself firmly, banging away with her head at those of her neighbors who seem to interfere with her movements. Then, she will seize with her mouth and her claws one of the scales that hang from her body, and set to work at it like a carpenter planing a soft piece of wood. She will pull it out, flatten it, bend it and roll it, moistening it with her tongue and licking it into shape; and, when at last she has got it to be just what she wanted, she will fix it to the highest point of the dome, thus laying the stone, the foundation, of the new city; for we have here a city that is being built downwards from the sky, and not from the earth upwards, like the cities of men. To this beginning she will add other morsels of wax, which she takes from beneath her belt; and at last, with one final lick of the tongue, one last touch of her feelers, she will go, as suddenly as she came, and disappear among the crowd. Another bee will at once take her place, carry on the work from the point where the first has left it; she will go through her own carpentering, just like her sister, and add to or improve the first one's job if she thinks this is called for. And then a third will follow, a fourth and a fifth, all coming from different corners, all eager and earnest, till numbers and numbers have taken their turn, none of them finishing the work but each adding her share to the task in which all combine.

A small lump of wax, as yet quite formless, hangs down from the top of the hive. As soon as it is sufficiently thick, we shall see another bee coming out of the mass. This one is very sure of herself, puts on a little side as it were; and she is watched very closely by the eager crowd below. She is one of the sculptors or carvers; she does not make any wax herself, her job being to deal with the material which the others have provided. She marks out the first cell, settles where it shall be; digs into the block for a moment, putting the wax she has taken out from the hole on the borders around it; and then she goes, making way for another, who is impatiently waiting her turn, and will go on with the work that a third will continue, while others close by are digging away at the wax on the opposite side. And very soon we shall be able to see the outline of the new comb. In shape it will be something like our own tongue, if you can imagine this to be made up of little six-sided cells, which all lie back to back. When the first cells have been built, the architects put on the ceiling, and then start building a second row, and a third and a fourth, and so on, gallery on the top of gallery, and the dimensions so carefully worked out that there will always be ample space, when the comb is finished, for the bees to move freely between its walls.

It happens, however, sometimes that a mistake has been made; that too much space, or too little, will have been left between the combs. The bees will do the best they can to set matters right; they will slant the one comb that is too near the other, or fill up the space that has been left with a new comb specially shaped.

The bees build four different kinds of cells. There are the royal cells, rather like an acorn in shape; the large cells in which the males are reared, and provisions stored when flowers are plentiful; the small cells used as cradles for the workerbees and also as ordinary store-rooms. These last are the most common kind, and about four-fifths of the buildings will be composed of them. Then there are also a certain number of what are known as "transition-cells," irregular in shape, which connect the larger cells with the smaller.

Each cell, with the exception of the transition ones, is worked out absolutely to scale, with extraordinary accuracy. It is a kind of six-sided tube, and two layers of these tubes form the comb. It is in these tubes that the honey is stored; and to prevent it from spilling, the bees tilt the tubes slightly forward. Each cell is solidly built, and the position of one to the other has been carefully thought out and arranged. Indeed, such wonderful skill and ingenuity is shown in the construction of the cells that it is difficult to believe that instinct alone is sufficient to account for it. The wasps, for instance, also build combs with six-sided cells; but their combs have only one layer of cells, and are not only less regular, but also less substantial; further, the wasps are so wasteful in their manner of working that, to say nothing of the loss of material, they also deprive themselves of about a third of the space that they might have used. Some bees again—which are not as civilized as those in our hives—build only one row of rearing-cells and rest their combs on shapeless and extravagant columns of wax. Their provision-cells are nothing but great pots, grouped together without any system or order. You could no more compare these nests with the cities of our own honey-bees than you could a village made up of huts with a modern town.

The very greatest ingenuity is shown in the construction of the combs, quite apart from the admirable precision of the architecture. Thus, for instance, there is a most skillful arrangement of alleys and gangways through and around the comb, which provide short cuts in every direction, allow the air to circulate, and prevent any block of the traffic. The connecting cells again, which join the large cells to the small ones, are so made that their shape can be altered with the least possible delay. There may be different reasons for desiring this alteration: an overflowing harvest may render more store-rooms necessary, or the workers may consider that the population of the hive should not be further increased, or it may be considered advisable that more males should be born. In any of these cases the bees will proceed, with unerring, unhesitating accuracy and precision to make the necessary changes, turning small cells into large, and large into small; and this without any waste of space or material, without allowing a single one of their buildings to become mis-shapen or purposeless, without in any way interfering with the neatness or general harmony of the hive.

The swarm whose movements we are following have started building their combs, which are already becoming fit for use. And although, as we look into the hive, we see little happening, there will be no pause, either by day or by night, in the creation of the wax, which will proceed with amazing quickness. The queen has been restlessly pacing to and fro on the borders that shine out gleamingly white in the darkness; and no sooner has the first row of cells been built than she eagerly takes possession, together with her servants, her guardians and counselors—though whether it be she who leads them, or they who direct her, is a matter beyond our knowledge. When the spot has been reached that she, or her retinue, regard as the proper one, she will arch her back, lean forward, and introduce the end of her long spindle-shaped body into one of the cells. Her escort form a circle around her, their enormous black eyes watching her every movement; they caress her wings, they feverishly wave their antennæ as though to encourage her, to urge her on, or perhaps to congratulate her. You can always easily tell where the queen is, because around her there will be a kind of starry cockade, something like the oval brooch that our grandmothers used to wear; of this she will be the center. And there is one curious thing that we may note here: the worker-bees never by any chance turn their back to the queen. When she approaches a group they immediately form themselves so as to face her, and walk backwards before her. It is a token of respect or reverence that they never fail to show; it is the unvarying custom.

Very soon the queen will be passing from cell to cell, busily laying her eggs. She will first peep into the cell to make sure that all is in order, and that she has not been there before. In the meanwhile two or three of her escort will have hastened into the cell which she has just left, in order to see that her work has been properly done, and to care for, and as it were tuck up, the little bluish egg she has laid. From now on right up to the first frosts of autumn the queen will never stop laying; she lays while she is being fed, she even lays in her sleep, if she ever does sleep, which may perhaps seem rather doubtful.

"The queen takes possession together with her servants, guardians and counsellors."