It becomes our business, therefore, to disentangle this confusion, to induce order where now is disorder; we must find out what this superior intellect wanted us to do; we must build in a few days what would normally have taken us years; we must alter our methods of labor, we must change these in accordance with the work that has already been done. In the meanwhile we must deal with all the problems that arise, we must meet all the difficulties that the superior intellect had not foreseen; we must learn how to make the fullest use of the wonderful opportunities that have been provided. This is more or less what the bees are doing to-day in our modern hives.
What one may call the local self-government, the bees' methods of dealing with their own affairs—such as the swarm, for instance, or the treatment of queens—these vary in every hive. Syrian hives have been known to produce 120 queens, whereas our own will never rear more than ten or twelve. In one hive in Syria 120 dead queen-mothers were found, together with ninety living ones. The bee is capable, too, of altering her ways, should conditions require it; of changing her methods. Take one of them to California or Australia, and her habits will become quite other than when she was in Europe. Having discovered that summer always abides in the land and that flowers never are absent, she will, after a time, be content to live from day to day, and gather only honey and pollen sufficient for her immediate requirements; and her observation of the new conditions will teach her that it is not necessary to make provision for the winter. All this she will learn in a year or two; and in fact it becomes necessary for the bee-keeper to deprive her of the fruits of her labor, in order to maintain her activity. Similarly it is said that, in the Barbadoes, the bees in such hives as are close to the sugar-refineries will entirely cease visiting the flowers, but will gather their store from the vast quantity of sweets that surround them.
Of wild bees no less than 4500 varieties are known. Some naturalists believe that the "Prosopis," a little wild bee that is found all over the world, is the original kind from which all the others have sprung. This unfortunate little insect is to our domestic bee more or less what a cave-dweller would be to a highly-civilized man of to-day. You will probably more than once have seen it, hovering over the bushes in a deserted corner of your garden, and it will never have occurred to you that there, fluttering before you, was the first-comer of those to whom we probably owe most of our flowers and plants; for it is a fact that more than a hundred varieties of plants would disappear if they were not regularly visited by the bees.
The prosopis is nimble and not unattractive, the French variety being elegantly marked with white over a black background. She leads a miserable life of starvation and solitude. Her body is almost bare; she has not the warm and sumptuous fleece of her happier sisters. She has no baskets in which to gather the pollen, no brushes, no towering plumes. With her tiny claws she must scratch away the powder from the cups of the flowers; and she must swallow this powder in order to bring it home. She has no tools to work with, nothing but her tongue, her mouth and her claws; and her tongue is short, her claws are feeble and her jaws without strength. Unable to form any wax, to bore holes through wood or dig in the earth, she builds clumsy galleries in the soft pith of dry berries; she puts up a few shapeless cells, and stores these with a little food for the young whom she never will see. And then, having done all this as best she can, she goes off and dies in some hidden corner, as lonely now at the end as she has been through all her poor life.
As the bees progress from wildness to civilization, we note that their tongue gradually lengthens, thus enabling more nectar to be drawn from the flowers; hairs and tufts grow and develop, and brushes for collecting the pollen; mandibles and claws become firmer and stronger and the bees acquire the intellect that enables them to make improvements in their dwellings. To relate all the different changes would require a whole volume; I will merely dwell on one or two instances of their development.
We have seen the unhappy prosopis living her lonely little life in the midst of this vast and indifferent universe. Some of her more civilized sisters, who have tools of their own and are skilled in the use of them, still exist in absolute solitude. If by chance some creature attach itself to them and share their dwelling, it will be an enemy or, more often, what is known as a parasite. For the world of bees contains many strange phantoms; and there are some species which will have a kind of indolent double, a creature exactly similar to the victim it has chosen to live with, save only that its uninterrupted idleness has caused it to lose one by one its implements of labor. It never works, or tries to work, it collects no food itself, but lives on that which is painfully got together by the unfortunate bee on whom it has fastened.
Little by little, by slow degrees and slow stages, the bees advance in civilization and intellect till we find them dwelling together in the regular life of a city. They have abandoned their solitude, their isolation; their existence, formerly so narrow and incomplete, has now become more assured, more concerned with the existence of those round about them. Instead of thinking only of their own offspring, they have learned that they must devote themselves to the race, that they must live and work together in order to make the future sure and safe.
There are certain building-bees which dig holes in the earth, and unite in large colonies to construct their nests. Between the individual members of the crowd, however, there is no communication and no understanding; they join together in a common task, but each one thinks only of her own particular interest. A little higher up in the scale we come to a race of bees, known as the Panurgi, who seem to have recognized the advantage of living and working as one community. They build in the same haphazard fashion as the others, each one digging its own underground chambers, but the entrance is common to all, as is also the gallery which winds from the surface to the different cells below. Here we find the idea of fellowship beginning to penetrate into the life of the bee, and it progresses with their civilization. As this increases, their manners and methods soften; what was formerly a mere instinct, due to the fear of cold and hunger, has become an active intelligence, working in the interests of life.