[CHAPTER XVII]
LOVE AMONG SOCIAL ANIMALS
Organization of reproduction among hymenoptera.—Bees.—Wedding of the queen.—Mother bee, cause and consciousness of the hive.—Sexual royalty.—Limits of intelligence among bees.—Natural logic and human logic.—Wasps.—Bumble-bees.—Ants.—Notes on their habits.—Very advanced state of their civilization.—Slavery and parasitism among ants.—Termites.—The nine principal active forms of termites.—Great age of their civilization.—Beavers.—Tendency of industrious animals to inactivity.
Social hymenoptera, bumble-bees, hornets, wasps, bees, have peculiar love customs very different from those of other animal species. It is not monogamy, since one finds in it nothing resembling the couple, nor polygamy, since the males know only one female, when they have even that adventure, and since the females are fecundated for the whole of their life by a single fecundation. It is, rather, a sort of matriarchate, even though the queen bee is not generally the mother of more than a part of the hive whereover she rules, the other part having sprung from the queen who has gone off with the new swarm, or from the one who has remained in the former hive. In very numerous hives there are about six or seven hundred males to one female. Copulation takes place in the air; as is the case with ants, it is only possible after a long flight has filled with air the pouches which cause the male's organ to emerge. Between these pockets, or aëriferous bladders shaped like perforated horns, emerges the penis, a small white body, plump and bent back at the point. In the vagina, which is round, wide and shallow, the sperm-pouch opens; it is a reservoir which can contain they say, a score of million of spermatozoides, destined to fecundate the eggs, during several years in proportion as they are to be laid. The form of the penis and the manner in which the sperm is coagulated by a viscous liquid into a veritable spermatophore, cause the death of the male. The copulation ended, he wishes to disengage himself but only manages to do so in leaving in the vagina not only the penis but all the organs attached to it. He falls like an empty bag, while the queen, returned to the hive, stops at the entrance, makes her toilet, aided by the workers who crowd about her: with her mandibles she gently removes the spine which has remained in her belly, and cleans the place with lustral attention. Then she enters the second period of her life: maternity. This penis which remains fast in the vagina makes one think of the darts of fighters which also remain in the wound; be it love or war the over-courageous beastlet expires, worn out and mutilated; there is in this a peculiar facility of dehiscence which seems very rare.
The wedding of the queen bee remained a long time absolutely mysterious, and even today there are only a very few observers who have been the distant witnesses of it. Réaumur, having isolated a queen and a male, witnessed a play or combat with movements which he interpreted with ingenuity. He could not see the actual coupling, which only takes place in the air. His story, is unique and nothing since has confirmed it. He shows us a queen approaching a male, sucking him with her proboscis, offering him honey, stroking him with her feet, and finally irritated by the coldness of her suitor, mounting his back, applying her vulva to the male organ, which Réaumur describes very well ("Memoirs," tome V) and which he represents as covered with a white viscous liquid. The real preludes, at least in a state of liberty, contradict the great observer. The female seems in no way aggressive. Here are the three authentic accounts I have been able to discover:
"6th July, 1849, M. Hannemann, bee-keeper at Wurtemburg, Thuringia was seated near my hive when his attention was aroused by an unaccustomed buzzing. Suddenly he saw thirty or forty drones" (i.e., false drones, male bees) "rapidly pursuing a queen-bee, about twenty or thirty feet up in the air. The group filled a space about two feet in diameter. Sometimes, in their flight, they came as low as ten feet from the ground, then rose, flying north to south. He followed them about a hundred yards, then a building interrupted him. The group of drones formed a sort of cone with the queen at the summit, then the cone enlarged into a globe of which she was the centre: at this moment the queen succeeded in getting away and rose vertically, still followed by the drones who had reformed the cone under her."[1]
"Some years later the Rev. Millette, at Witemarsh, observed the final phase of the act. During a hiving, he noticed a flying queen, who an instant later, was stopped by a male. After having flown about a rod they fell to the ground hooked to each other. He approached and captured them both, at the very moment when the male had abandoned himself to the embrace; he carried them to the house and let them loose in a closed room. The queen, angry, flew toward the window; the male after dragging himself for an instant across the open palm of the observer's hand, fell to floor and died. Both male and female had at the tip of the abdomen drops of a milky white liquid; by squeezing the male, he saw that the male had lost his genital organs." (Farmer and Gardener, 1859.)
"Having seen the queen go out, M. Carrey closed the entrance of the hive. During his absence, which lasted a quarter of an hour, three false-drones came to the entrance and finding it closed, continued flying. When the queen on her return was only about three feet from the hive, one of the drones flew very rapidly toward her, throwing his legs around her body. They stopped, resting on a long grass-blade. Then an explosion was distinctly heard, and they separated. The drone fell to the ground quite dead, with abdomen much contracted. After a few circles in the air, the mother entered the hive." (Copulation of the mother bee, in l'Apiculteur, 6e année, 1862.)