“But,” I asked him, “are not drones absolutely necessary in a hive? The population cannot increase without the male bees.”
“Good drones are just as important in a bee-garden as high-mettled, prolific queens,” he said; “and drone-breeding on a small scale must form part of the work on every modern bee-farm of any size. But my own practice is to confine the drones to two or three hives only. These are stationed in different parts of the farm. They are always selected stocks of the finest and most vigorous strain, and in them I encourage drone-breeding in every possible way. But the male bees in all honey-producing hives are limited to a few hundreds at most.”
Coming out into the darkness from the brilliantly-lighted building, we had gone some way on our homeward road through the crowded bee-farm before we marked the change that had come over the sky. Heavy vaporous clouds were slowly driving up from the west and blotting the stars out one by one. All their frosty sparkle was gone, and the night air had no longer the keen tooth of winter in it. The bee-master held up his hand.
“Listen!” he said. “Don’t you hear anything?”
I strained my ears to their utmost pitch. A dog barked forlornly in the distant village. Some night-bird went past overhead with a faint jangling cry. But the slumbering bee-city around us was as silent and still as death.
“When you have lived among bees for forty years,” said the bee-master, plodding on again, “you may get ears as long as mine. Just reckon it out. The wind has changed; that curlew knows the warm weather is coming; but the bees, huddled together in the midst of a double-walled hive, found it out long ago. Now, there are between three and four hundred hives here. At a very modest computation, there must be as many bees crowded together on these few acres of land as there are people in the whole of London and Brighton combined. And they are all awake, and talking, and telling each other that the cold spell is past. That is what I can hear now, and shall hear—down in the house yonder—all night long.”
CHAPTER XII
THE QUEEN BEE: IN ROMANCE AND REALITY
“Queens?” said the Bee-Master of Warrilow, as he filled his pipe with the blackest and strongest tobacco I had ever set eyes on; “queens? There are hundreds of hives here, as you can see; and there isn’t a queen in any one of them.”
He drew at the pipe until he had coaxed it into full blast, and the smoke went drifting idly away through the still April sunshine. We were in the very midst of the bee-garden, sitting side by side on the honey-barrow after a long morning’s work among the hives; and the old bee-man had lapsed into his usual contemplative mood.
“’Tis a pretty idea,” he went on, “this of royalty, and a realm of dutiful subjects, and all the rest of it, in bee-life. But experience in apiculture, as with most things of this world, does away with a good many fine and fanciful notions. Now, the mother-bee in a hive, whatever else you might call her, is certainly not a queen, in the sense of ruling over the other bees in the colony. The truth is she has little or nothing to do with the direction of affairs. All the thinking and contriving is done by the worker-bees. They have the whole management of the hive, and simply look upon the queen as a much prized and carefully-guarded piece of egg-laying machinery, to be made the most of as long as her usefulness lasts, but to be thrown over and replaced by another the moment her powers begin to flag.”