Still watching the outside life of the hive in the old bee-garden, many other interesting things come to light. In such an establishment, even if it be only an old-fashioned straw skep, perhaps more than twenty thousand individuals are located; and obviously some regular system of cleaning and scavenging is indispensable. This work can be seen now, going on uninterruptedly in the midst of all the other busy enterprises. Every moment bees come labouring out, bearing particles of refuse, which they throw over the edge of the foot-board, and at once shoulder their way back for another load. Other bees appear, carrying the bodies of comrades who have died in the hive; and every now and then one comes struggling through the crowd, bearing high above her a strange and ghastly thing, perfect replica of herself, but white throughout, save for its black beady eyes. This is the unborn bee, dead in its cradle-cell. Infant mortality is an evil not yet overcome even by the doughty honey-bee, and many are carried out thus, especially in early spring. Watching these undertakers of the hive in their gruesome but necessary work, a singular fact can be noted. While all other debris is merely cast over the brink of the entrance-board, where it accumulates day by day on the grass below, these dead larvæ are never disposed of thus. They are carried right away, their bearers taking wing and flying straight off over the hedgerow, to drop them at harmless distance from the neighbourhood of the hive.
There is still another kind of work going briskly forward round the gates of the bee-city. Certain among these stay-at-home bees seem to exercise a sort of common overseership. They help those weighed down with too heavy a cargo to reach the city gates. If a lump of pollen is dropped in the general scuffle, these bees seize it and take it into the hive. Sometimes a bee comes eddying downward, smothered from head to foot with pollen, like a golden miller, and she is immediately pounced upon by these superintendents, and combed free of her incommodious treasure. Others see to the grooming of the young bees, about to essay their first flight. The youngster sits up, protruding her tongue to its fullest extent, while half a dozen bees gather round her, licking and stroking her on every side. At last her toilette is done, and she is liberated, when, with a little flutter of her wings, she lifts high into the blue air and sunshine and makes off with the rest to the clover-fields, glittering afar off in the joyous midday light.
For insensibly the hours have worn on—it is noon—and the tense thronging life, the deep rich labour-song, of the bee-garden seem to have reached their height. But suddenly a greater noise than ever arises on all sides: a steady stream of bees, larger and bulkier than the rest, is pouring out of every hive. The drones, the lazy brothers of these laborious vestals, have roused at last from their sleep, and are coming abroad for their daily flight. In twos and threes, in whole battalions, they hustle out, and begin their noontide gambols about the hive, filling the air with a gay, roistering song. In a little while they will be all gone to their revels, and the bee-garden will seem, by comparison, strangely quiet. But now the sudden accession of energy is unmistakable. With the awakening of the drones there seems to be a new spirit abroad. The air is no longer filled to overflowing with busy foragers. Many of these have joined the dance round the hives, so that each bee-dwelling is the centre of a singing, gambolling crowd, moved rather by a spirit of play, almost of idleness. But this brief moment of relaxation soon passes. The drones betake themselves to their marital pleasuring in the fields. The noisy midday symphony dies down to the old steady monotone of work. And the watcher at the gates of the bee-city turns to retrace his steps down the flower-garlanded way of the old pleasance, satiated with wonders, yet not satisfied, his curiosity only quickened a thousandfold for that which has been inexorably held from him, a glimpse of what is happening behind those baffling walls of straw.
Wending slowly homeward, and pondering, he asks himself many questions. What is the reason, the final outcome, of all this earnest, well-directed labour? What is done with the pollen that has been carried in all the morning long? Where there is obviously so much system, and unanimity, and ingenious division of endeavour, there cannot fail to be a supreme and governing intelligence to allot the part that each must play. This story of a queen—of a single bee, larger than all the rest, to whom all pay allegiance, and who spends her whole life in the dim labyrinth of the hive, like the Pope in the Vatican—is it a truth, or only a figment of the ignorant, bucolic brain? If this queen exist, if every hive have indeed its absolute monarch, who directs the whole complex life and policy of the bee-city, where in the scale of reasoning creatures must she be placed?
And then, if he be wise, the student will learn at last to give the picturesque old bee-garden its true appraisement. Ancient things conserve their beauty, and win the love of the right kind of lovers, more and more with every century that glides by. Only their usefulness, their import in the tide of human knowledge and progress, has gone with the years. It is so with the bee-garden under its Maytide robe of green leaves and rainbow blossoms. It is beautiful in its glad appearances, its echo of old voices, its odour of the sanctity in ancient ways and days. But it can tell us nothing of all we want to know. It can only ask us riddles to which we have no answers. For these we must set aside old fanciful scruples; turn our backs, once for all, on its enchantment and its sweetness; bend our steps unswervingly towards the great modern bee-farm on the hill.
CHAPTER V
THE COMMONWEALTH OF THE HIVE
A Doctor Dryasdust will manage to impart to the truths he meddles with a disastrous air of dulness and stagnation; but to walk in a fools’ paradise of beautiful, artistic error is to lay oneself open to an infinitely worse fate. There never was a truth in Nature that was dull or uninteresting, except in its human presentment. There never was a pretty worthless fiction that did not show its dross and tinsel when brought out into the searching light of day. Romance, the spirit of poetry, have largely changed their venue of recent years. The unconscionable delver among old things, old thoughts, old conventions, on the strand of Time, has tarried so long in his one little florid corner that he is in some danger of being caught by the tide. He must soon either mend his pace or swim for it. Human regard is turning more and more towards those who deal in living verities—the men who search the stars, who win new powers out of the common air, who find at last the authentic teachings in the old worn texts of the stones and brooks. These are the true poets, romancists, tellers of wondrous tales; and these will hold the crowd—which is never far astray in its intuitions—when all the singers of sick fancies and the harpers on frayed golden strings have gone off in melancholy dudgeon to their own place.
The old story—which has held such a long and honoured position in school text-books, and in the writings of those who tell of Nature’s wonders from the commanding watch-tower of the study fire—the old story of the queen-bee ruling her thirty or forty thousand dutiful subjects, and guiding them unerringly in all their marvellous exploits and enterprises, must go now with the rest. For the truth, as modern observers have unquestionably established it, is that the queen-bee is no ruler in the hive, but even a more obedient subject than any. The real instigators and contrivers of everything that takes place within the hive are the worker-bees themselves. The queen has neither part nor lot in the direction of the common polity; nor has she any power, mental or physical, to help in the carrying out of public works. Her sole duty is that of motherhood, and even in this she derives all initiative from the sovereign worker-bees. She is little more than an ingenious piece of mechanism, and carefully guarded and cherished accordingly. She has certain propensities, and certain elemental passions, which she can always be counted on to exercise in certain well-defined and limited ways. But as an intelligent, originating force she counts for nothing. The mind in the hive is the collective mind of the whole colony, apart from the queen and drones—an hereditary, communal intellect evolved through the ages, the sum and total of all bee experience since the world of bees began.
If, however, modern science compels us to divest the mother-bee of all her regal state and quality, and thus destroy one of the prettiest delusions of ancient times, it is only to take up a story of real life more alluring and romantic still. In the light of new understanding the old facts take on a mystery and excite a wonderment greater than ever before. If we found the life of the hive an enthralling study when we supposed it to originate from one winged atom endowed with acute and commanding abilities, how much more fascinating must it prove when we come to see that all this complex system of government is instituted and kept together by the harmonious working of tens of thousands of reasoning beings?
Reasoning—it is a big word, a double-edged thing that requires careful handling. We have been so long accustomed to use it only in regard to our own magnificent mental processes that it savours almost of the ridiculous to bring it to bear upon such a tiny et-cetera in the brute creation as the honey-bee. And yet, the deeper we go in the study of the bee and all her works, the more difficult it becomes to find a word that shall more fittingly meet the case. Instinct will not do. Instinct implies a dead perfection of motive, born of omniscience, working through unthinking, unvarying organisms to an equally perfect end. But in neither project nor performance can the honey-bee be said invariably to achieve, or even to aim at, perfection. It will be seen hereafter that her motives, her methods, the results she brings about, all show frequent, undeniable error or deviation. She attempts to carry through a sound enterprise, but abandons it on finding unforeseen difficulties in the way. She will persevere blindly in an obviously foolish piece of business, and fail to see her mistake until both energy and resources are at an end. Sudden emergencies may find her ready with the saving stroke of last ingenuity, or merely plunge her into listless despair. Courage, industry, economy, wise forethought, or still wiser afterthought, are all common traits in her nature. But she may develop idleness, unthrift, slovenliness, or even downright dishonesty, if chance or circumstance indicate the way.