The Lore of the Honey-Bee

by Tickner Edwardes

And what are all these but the defects or attributes of reason? If bees and men, each admittedly rooted in divinity, be prone to the like failings and inconsequences, who shall discriminate between them, dividing arbitrarily natural cause and effect?

Watching bees at work for the first time through the glass panels of an observation hive, or in the almost equally informing modern hive with movable combs, this question continually arises, and there seems only one answer for it. There is something curiously human-like in their movements over the crowded combs, and the old comparison of a beehive to a city of men is never out of mind. There are the incessant hurryings to and fro; chance meetings of friends at odd street-corners; altercations where we can almost hear the surly complaint and tart reply; busy masons and tilers and warehouse-hands at work everywhere: a hundred different enterprises going forward in every thronging thoroughfare or narrow side-lane, from the great main entrance to the remotest drone-haunted corner of the hive.

You will see the huge, full-bodied queen labouring over the combs from cell to cell, with a circle of attendants ever about her. In the highest stories of the hive the honey-makers are at work, pouring the new-garnered sweets into the vats, or sealing over with impervious wax the mature honey. Where the nurseries are established, in the central and warmest region of the hive, the nurse-bees are hurrying incessantly over the combs, looking into each cell to mark the progress of the larvæ; giving each its due ration of bee-milk; or, when the time arrives, walling up the cell with a covering that shall insure its privacy, but freely admit the air. Here and there the young bees have awakened from their transforming slumber, and are clamouring at the stoppings of their prenatal tombs, gnawing their way out vigorously, or thrusting forth red, glistening, ravenous tongues, eager to end their long fast. Where these raw youngsters have at last won their way into existence, they can be seen assiduously grooming themselves, or searching the neighbouring comb for honey, while the nurse-bees are busy cleaning out the cells, just vacated, to make them ready for the queen when she comes by on her next egg laying round.

And all these operations are going forward simultaneously on an incredibly large scale. Certain amazing scraps of information are given to the wondering on-looker, which he hears, but can, at this stage in his progress, seldom rightly estimate. He is told that the queen is the only mother-bee in the colony, large as it is; that, in the prime of her maternity, she will lay as many as 3,000 eggs a day; and that she has the power to produce either male or female eggs, or none at all, at will. He is told that, except when she leads forth the swarm, she goes out of the hive only once in her life, and this is her wedding-trip. On this one occasion she has traffic with the drone somewhere incredibly high up in the blue air and sunshine of the summer’s day; and that immediate death is her suitor’s invariable portion; that she returns at once to the hive, and thereafter for the rest of her life, which may endure for years, she passes her time in immaculate widowhood, yet retaining her fertility to the end.

She is pointed out to the gaping novice as she travels her unceasing round of the brood-combs, and her various attributes are explained to him. He is shown how much larger she is than the worker-bee; how her bodily structure differs in a dozen important ways; how her instincts and habits resemble those of the common worker hardly in a single particular. Finally he is told something at which the most polite credulity may well demur. Although the mother-bee is to all appearances of a totally different race, the egg from which she was raised was identical with that which produces the little worker. Her bodily size, the change in the number and shape of her organs, her mental differences, are all due to treatment and diet alone. There is no reason why she should not have been an ordinary neuter working-bee, nor why any one of the thirty or forty thousand little workers in a hive should not have become a great queen-bee, the sole mother of an entire colony, save for the edict of the communal mind. More wonderful still, the drones, the male bees—the brothers, never the fathers, of their own hive, as has been so often stated—owe the fact of their sex entirely to the will or whim of the hive authorities, working through the docile agency of the queen. Until the moment before the egg is laid, the question of the sex of the resulting bee is held in abeyance. This big lusty drone, with exuberant masculinity obvious in every posture and act; his totally different organism; his incapacity for anything else than the fulfilment of the one office required of him, for he cannot even entirely feed himself; his habit of spending his life either in a comfortable lethargy of repletion at home, or in amorous knight-errantry abroad—this drone might have been a little plodding worker-bee, with shrunken yet elaborated body and curiously developed brain, whose one idea in life is to get through the largest amount of work before death claims her, and who is armed with a formidable poisoned sting, while the drone has none.

It is useless at this stage to tell the learner that all these vital differences—miracles, indeed, in the ordinary meaning of the word—are brought about by the leading powers of the hive in certain simple, easily explainable ways. He has lost, for the moment, all sight of and interest in the details, however extraordinary, in the perception that has dawned on him of the vastness of the entire plan. Here is a community that, to all appearances, has solved every problem relating to the well-being and progress of a crowded, highly organised society. Questions that are now vexing socialistic philosophers in the human world, or are looming dark in the immediate future—problems of numerical increase in relation to food-supply, the balance of the sexes, communal or individual ownership in property, due qualification for parenthood, the hegemony of might or right—all seem to have been happily settled long ago in this remarkable bee-commonwealth. In itself a prosperous, well-conducted hive appears to offer a living example, a perfect object-lesson of what Socialism, carried out to its last and sternest conclusions, must mean to human and apiarian communities alike. Here is a number of individuals—counting anything from ten thousand to fifty or sixty thousand, according to their condition and the time of year—living heathily and comfortably in the space of a few cubic feet. The principle, all for the greatest good of the greatest number, is elevated into a prime maxim, to which every one must bow. The fiction of royalty is maintained in harmony with the perfect republican spirit. The females are supreme in everything, the males in nothing. Growth of population is accelerated or retarded, according to estimations of the immediate or future supply of food. The proportion of the sexes is varied at will. The rule, that those who cannot work must not live, is applied with relentless consistency. All the garnered wealth of the State is held in common for the common good. When the settlement becomes too populous, and the boundaries cannot be extended, a large part of its inhabitants are forced to emigrate, taking with them only so much of the state property as they can carry in their haversacks, and relinquishing all claim to the rest. The governing females have apparently agreed among themselves that only one of their number shall exercise the privilege of motherhood; and when her fertility declines, she is deposed, and a new mother-bee, specially raised for the purpose, installed in her place.

All these, and a host of other facts as to bee-life, are crowded into the bewildered brain of the tiro until its capacity is exhausted, and he can take no more. He begins to see, at length, that he is approaching a great matter too fast, and from the wrong direction. Like a scholar who, resolving on a new and difficult branch of study, commences at the end of his treatise instead of at the beginning, he finds himself in the midst of terms and equations of which he knows nothing. All this desultory peering into hive-windows, and listening to scraps of astounding information, is nothing but opening the book of bee-life here and there at odd disjointed pages, getting a swift impression of certain lurid, kaleidoscopic details, but no grounding in the consecutive science of the facts. There is nothing for it—if he be resolved to know the life of the honey-bee truly—but to turn back to the first page of the volume, and steadily work his way through to the end—if end there be.

All know the English honey-bee—the Black Bee, as she is called, partly to distinguish her from her foreign rivals, and partly, it would seem, because she is not black at all, but a rich brown—but all do not know her origin. Probably she came to us from the tropics by easy stages, swarm out-flying swarm, until the most adventurous crossed the English Channel in remote ages, when it was only a narrow race of water, or even before Great Britain was detached from the mainland.

It was the black bee, and not the motley-coloured Italian or other varieties, who came to us thus, for the same reason, probably, that the Celts came—because they were a hardy race, loving, and being more fitted for the bracing northern atmosphere than the heat and languor of the south. Modern bee-breeders who are trying so hard to acclimatise in Britain the golden-girdled or silver-fringed bee-races of other lands, might well ponder this fact. No keener controversy rages to-day among English bee-masters than this one of the relative merits of native and foreign stocks. But assuredly Nature has not erred in this respect. South Down sheep can be reared in any county, but nowhere so fine as on the Sussex Downs. The like principle holds good with the English bee. The ages have evolved her from her tropic beginnings to make her what she is—a doughty, essentially British creature, thriving against all odds of fickle climate, when her more tender sisters from the south are hard put to it for a living. She has held her own against them, and more than her own. In bumper seasons, such as we get all too rarely, when, in sober truth, the land is flowing with honey, there is little to choose between the rival honey-makers. But through good and bad, early and late, for steady, dogged industry, invincible hardihood, tangible results, the English black bee has out-distanced all competitors. Thousands of years have gone to her making, and thousands more may conceivably fit the yellow-skirted Ligurian for British work. But labour for so remote a posterity were altruism meeter for angels than for men.