The Natural Philosophy of Love

by Remy de Gourmont

Save the remark about the final explosion, these three accounts accord well enough, and give an exact idea of one of the couplings most difficult to get sight of.

It is, moreover, the one half-obscure point in bee life. One knows all the rest, their three sexes, rigorously specialized, the precise industry of the wax-workers, the diligence of the collectresses, the political sense of these extraordinary amazons, their initiatives, when the hive is too full, their starts for the formation of new swarms, the duels of queens where the populace intervene, the massacre of males as soon as they are useless, the nurse's art in transforming a vulgar larva into the larva of a queen, the methodical activity of these republics where all wills, united in a single conscience, have no other aim but the common well-being and the conservation of the race. It is however these over-mechanical virtues which constitute the inferiority of the bee; the workers are extremely laborious and well-behaved, but they lack even that slight personality which characterizes sexed insects. The much less reasonable queen is more living, she is capable of jealousy, rage, of despair when she feels her royalty menaced by the new queen whom the nurses have bred up in secret. Even the useless, noisy, pillaging, parasitic males, drunk and swollen with vain sperm are more attractive than the honest workers, and handsomer also, stronger, more slender, more elegant. Bee-lovers generally despise these musketeers, yet it is they who incarnate the animality, that is to say the beauty of the specie. If it is true as M. Maeterlinck believes (La Vie des Abeilles), that the most vigorous of seven or eight hundred males finally seduces the royal virgin, then their laziness, their greediness, their giddy staggering are but so many virtues.

It seems that the queen and even the workers can without fecundation lay eggs which will hatch into males; but copulation is necessary in order to produce females and queens; now as only the queen can receive the male, a hive without a queen is doomed. That is the practical point of view, the sexual point of view leads to other reflections. A female can, quite alone, give birth to a male: but to have an egg hatch female, it must be fecundated by a male born spontaneously: one observes here the real exteriorization of the male organ, a segmentation of the genital power, into two forces, the male force and the female. Thus disunited, it acquires a new faculty which will fully unfold itself by the reintegration of the two halves of the initial force into a single force. But why do the virgin-born ovules necessarily give birth to males, among bees, and to females among plant lice? That is the question defying answer. All that one sees is that parthenogenesis is always transitory, and that after a number of virginal generations, normal fecundation always intervenes.

One can not say that the mother bee is a true queen, a veritable chief, but she is the important personage in the hive, the one without whom life stops. The workers have the air of being mistresses; in reality their nervous centre is in the queen; they act only for her, and by her. Her disappearance sets the hive crazy, and drives it to absurd endeavours, such as the transformation of a nurse into a layer, though she will give eggs of one sex only, so many useless mouths. In reflecting on this last expedient one can measure the importance of sex, and understand the absolutism of its royalty. Sex is king, and there is no royalty save the sexual. The making neuter of the workers, which sets them out of norm, if it is a cause of order in the hive, is above all a cause of death. There are no living creatures save those who can perpetuate life.

The interest offered by bees is very great, but does not pass that offered by the observation of most hymenoptera, social or solitary, or of certain neuroptera, such as termites; or even by beavers, and many birds. But bees have been through many ages our sugar-producers, and they alone; hence man's tenderness for insects more valuable than all others to him. Their intelligence is well developed, but soon shows its limitations. People pretend that bees know their master, a manifest error. The relations of bees and man are purely human. It is evident that they are as ignorant of man as are all the other insects, and all other invertebrata. They allow themselves to be exploited, in the sense of their instinct, to the limit of famine and muscular exhaustion. Virgil's phrase is excessively true, in all the senses one wishes to take: Sic vos non vobis mellificatis apes. (Bees making honey not for yourselves.) These clever, witty creatures are fooled by the gross fakes of our industrial cunning. When they have stacked their winter's provisions, honey, into their wax combs, one removes the honeycombs, and replaces them by sockets of varnished paper: and the solemn bees, set themselves to forgetting their long labours; before these virgin combs, they have but one idea: to fill them. They restart work with a bustle which would excite veritable pity in any man but a bee-keeper. These commercials have invented a hive with moveable combs. The bees will never know. Bees are stupid.

But we who see the limits of intelligence in bees, should consider the limits of our own. There are limits; it is possible to conceive brains who observing us, would say: men are stupid. All intelligence is limited; it is just this shock against the limit, against the wall, which by the pain it causes, engenders consciousness. We are not to laugh too much at the bees who gaily furnish the mobile combs of their improved hives. We are perhaps the slaves of a master who exploits us, and who will remain forever unknown. The polygamy, or if one wish, the polyandry of bees, pretext for this digression, is then purely virtual; it is in the state of possibility, but it will never be realized, since the fecundity of the queen is assured by a single act. The excessive multiplicity of males corresponds doubtless to an ancient order in which the females were more numerous. In any case only two or three males out of about a thousand, are used, or let us say ten, if you wish to suppose very frequent swarming, this demonstrates that one must not prejudge the habits of an animal specie by the overabundance of one sex or another, and that, in a general fashion, one must place natural logic above our human logic, derived from mathematical logic. Facts in nature are connected by a thousand knots of which no one is solvable by human logic. When one of these tangles is unravelled before our eyes we marvel at the simplicity of its mechanism, we think we understand, we make generalities, we prepare to open neighbouring mysteries with the same key: illusion. One always has to begin again at the start. Thus the sciences of observation become increasingly obscure as one penetrates further into the labyrinth.

Among wasps and hornets there is nothing resembling polygamy, even potentially. A fecundated female after passing the winter, constructs, by herself, the first foundations of a nest, lays the eggs, from which sexless individuals are born; these workers then assume all material labours, finish the nest, watch the larvæ which the female continues to produce. These are now males and females: after coupling the males die, then the workers, the females become languid, those who survive will found as many new tribes.

The generation of bumble-bees is more curious, the differentiation of castes more complicated. There are among them, males, workers, small females, great females. A great female, having passed the winter, founds a nest in the earth, often in moss (there is a sort called the moss bee), she constructs a wax comb, lays. From the first eggs come workers who, as in wasps, construct the definitive nest, pillage, make honey, and being more industrious than the other sort of bees who fear dampness, they scour the country long after sunset. After the workers, the little females see light; they have no function save laying, without fecundation, the eggs which will hatch male. Simultaneously the queen produces great females who will soon couple with the males. Then, as with wasps, all the colony dies except the fecundated great females, by whom the cycle will recommence, the following spring.

There are three casts of ants, or four if one count, the division of neuters into workers and fighters, as among termites. Here, as with bees, the neuters are the base of the republic, the males die after mating, the females after laying. "There are," says M. Janet (Recherches sur l'anatomie de la fourmi) "workers so different from the others, in the development of their mandibles and the largeness of their heads that one calls them soldiers, a name according with the rôle they fill in the colony." These soldiers are also butchers, who cut up prey which is too large or dangerous. Specialization is the only superiority of the neuters who for the rest seem inferior to the females and to the males in size, muscling and visual organs. The females are sometimes half as large again as the neuters, the males being between the two sizes. The ant shows much more intelligence than the bee. Before this tiny people one seems really to touch humanity. Consider that the ants have slaves, and domestic animals. First the plant lice, preferably those who live on roots, and, at need, those of the rose-bush, who are milked, and who permit it, subjected by long heredity. Aphis formicarum vacca, says Linnæus briefly (beetle the ants' cow). But wandering herds are not enough for them, they keep in the interior of their ant-hills, colonies of slave plant-lice, of domesticated staphylins. The staphylins are small coleoptera with mobile abdomen, one of their species is only found among ants. They are domesticated to the point of no longer being able to feed themselves: the ants stuff the necessary food into their mouths. In return the staphylins furnish their masters a revenue analogous to that which they get from the plant-lice: from the bunch of hairs rising at the base of their abdomen they seem to exude a delectable liquor, at least one sees the ants suck these hairs with great eagerness. These animals permit it. They are so much at home, that the same observer (Muller, traduit par Brullé, dans le Dictionnaire d'histoire naturelle de Guérin, au mot Pselaphiens) has seen them coupling without fear in the midst of the busy ant people, the male hunched on the back of the female, solidly crammed against the mellifluous tuft of ant's delicacies.

One knows that the red ants make war on the black ants and steal their nymphs, who, retained in captivity, make them excellent domestics, attentive and obedient. White humanity also, at one point in its history, found itself faced with a like opportunity, but less prudent than the red ant, it let it pass, from sentimentalism, thus betraying its destiny, renouncing, under Christian inspiration, the complete and logical development of its civilization. Is it not amusing that slavery is presented to us as anti-natural, when it is on the contrary, normal and excessively natural to the most intelligent of animals? And in an order of ideas more closely related to the subject of this book, if the making neuter of a part of the population, placing them in castes vowed to continence, is an anti-natural attempt, how is it that social hymenoptera, ants, bees, bumble-bees, and termites among neuroptera, have managed it so well, and have made it the basis of their social state? Doubtless there is nothing like it among animals; but mammals, apart from man, that monster, even including beavers, are infinitely inferior to insects. If the habits of social birds (for there are such) were better known, one might find analogous practices among them. The sexual co-operation of all the members of a people being useless so far as the conservation of the race is concerned; and on the other hand inferior species living as neighbours to a superior species being destined to disappear, slavery is good for the inferiors as it assures them perpetuity and a sort of evolution suited to their feebleness.