In her old primæval fastnesses the honey-bee is little likely to have troubled herself with hive-making, but to have hung her combs to some convenient branch in the forest, much as the bees in India do to-day. The habit of seeking some hollow tree or cleft in the rock grew upon her probably as she advanced northward, and some nightly or seasonal shelter became more and more an imperious need. The present-day customs of wild creatures give some inkling of their ancestral ways, but it is in their occasional aberrations from these customs that we get the truest indications of what their original state must have been. Lost swarms of bees, if they fail to pitch upon some better site, will often build in the open, either suspending their waxen houses from some horizontal branch, or making them in the heart of a thick bush.
The ways of the honey-bee are full of such deviations, due, perhaps, to the working of old ancestral memory rousing dimly in the midst of modern needs. The issue of a swarm may be nothing else than the survival of an old process, vital enough in its day, but, under the present civilised conditions of bee-life, lacking the whet of entire necessity. For, in all respects, the life of the bee, ancient as it is, is an evolved civilisation, and not a surviving, aboriginal state. It is conceivable that the foxes have their holes, and the birds their nests, much after the same fashion as in the days when Adam invented love-making. But the twentieth-century honey-bee is not of this kind. The communal habit itself may even have been a comparatively late introduction in her progress. It is possible to get some idea of the path she won for herself through the ages by studying the ways of creatures now living, but immeasurably less advanced than the bee. There are distant connections of hers—lonely little wood-wasps and others—which never associate with their kind, but get through the short summer hours in solitude, and die with the waning season, leaving the perpetuation of their species to the children they never see. The common wasp is nearer the honey-bee in development, but still infinitely far behind. The fecundated queen-wasp comes out of her winter hiding-place, fashions a cell or two in some hole in the ground, and deposits her first eggs, thus laying the foundation of a colony which, populous enough in the season, must nevertheless perish with the next winter chills.
In the primæval tropics the honey-bees may have lived in separate families, each with its teeming mother, its indolent, lie-abed father—the Turveydrop of creation—and its bevy of youngsters, every one going out, when grown, to establish a home for itself. The modern bee-city, with its complicated systems and laws, and its innumerable multitudes, may have originated only when change of habitat and climate brought about the necessity for a new order of things. Living in perpetual warmth, in a land where blossom followed blossom in unending succession, there would be no need for such co-operation. The one little family, snugging close in its moss-roofed corner, could sustain its own temperature; and where there was unceasing array of nectar-producing flowers, foresight would have been folly: the winter larder would have been left to take care of itself.
But as the young bees, leaving their homes, and flying ever northward, came first into temperate zones, and then into the fringe of Arctic influences, the conditions gradually changed. The perpetual sipping-garden was left behind; and a season came in each year—short at first, but inevitably lengthening—when there were no flowers. Hard necessity must have taught the bee, then, first to gather together with her kind for warmth during the cold season; and then, as this got longer and longer, to make some food-provision for winter days that would eke out endurance until the spring sun again wooed the earth into flower-giving. Thus the first communal bee-nests must have been evolved from the universal need of the race: the first common storehouses instituted: a host of unforeseen difficulties and side-issues encountered, and means for dealing with them contrived. The spirit of invention must have been busy then with the race, and taxed to the limit, of her resources. For never did Pandora open celestial casket upon earth with more redoubtable consequences, than when the Great Artificer set up the honey-bee as an examplar of city-building to the nomadic world of men.
From the crowding together of the separate bee-families for mutual protection against the elements, to a complete and permanent fusion of life and interests, must have been only a step, as Nature works. But then there must have been stirring times—social upheavals, educative disasters, a cataclysmic war of sex. Bee-life must have been shaken to its very foundations. When and how the woman-bee first got the upper hand in the direction of affairs, it is unimportant to determine. But it is certain that she got it, and has kept it ever since. The population problem must have been the great, overwhelming one. With hundreds of prolific mothers in the hive, each having enough to do at home in rearing her own children, and a crowd of lazy, irresponsible drones who could do nothing but dance in the sunshine or go a-wooing, how were the daily needs of the hive to be satisfied, leaving out of account the provision that must be made for coming winter days? It was clearly a case of reform or annihilation; and it may be conceived that the woman-bees, in default of masculine initiative, took the reins into their own hands.
It is a prophetic story. First they discovered their latent powers. The harmless ovipositor revealed itself as a prime weapon of offence. Thus the army was with the revolutionaries, and the rest was easy. A great, far-reaching scheme was set afoot. Motherhood was to be a privilege of the few and the fittest; work the compulsory lot of the mass. Hard times had already bred a lean, unfertile gang among them, and it was discovered that famine rations in the nursery meant a wholesale increase in these natural spinsters of the race. Henceforth the little sex-atrophied worker-bee was multiplied in the hive, while the fully nurtured mothers were gradually reduced to a few—at last to one alone. It was a triumph of collective self-sacrifice for the well-being and high persistence of the race.
All this may be imagined as having taken place in infinitely remote times, long before man succeeded in distinguishing himself from the apes. In the honey-bee of to-day, and her life in the modern hive, we get a sort of quintessence of the ages; a creature developed in mind and body by her unique conditions, these conditions again imposing upon her unique systems of life. Like Ruskin’s Venetian, she must live nobly or perish. Much more is required of her than the role of domestic and political economist. To make the modern beehive a possibility there must be architects, mathematicians, and chemists within its walls. Sanitary science must have its skilled exponents, or the hive would change into a death-trap within a few hours. There must be land-surveyors ready to explore the country, just before the issue of the swarms, to determine for them their new location. There must be overseers, gang-forewomen, everywhere to superintend every work in progress throughout the hive. Above all, there must be a supreme central power, a farseeing intelligence, to divine the imminent common need, and to set the forces of the State to work, in right time and order, to provide for it. If all these cannot be proved to exist in a hive of bees to-day, at least the necessity for them is undeniable; and as undeniable, the achieved results.
CHAPTER VI
EARLY WORK IN THE BEE-CITY
The “turn of the days,” when the winter sun has passed its nadir of feebleness and just made its earliest wan recovery in the skies, marks the true beginning of the honey-bee’s year. Then the first few eggs are laid in the heart of the brood-nest; the drowsy cluster begins to show an interest in life; the water-carriers bestir themselves, watching for a bright warm morning that they may sally forth to ply their trade.
Dangerous work it is at this season, yet most necessary. Without water the rearing of the young bees is impossible on any but the smallest scale. Water is needed at every stage of their development, and, lacking it, the progress of the colony must be fatally checked. Even the mature bees will starve and die in the midst of plenty, if their honey-stores are candied, and no water is available to dissolve the inassimilable sweets. The hive that shows honey crystals thrown down on the floor, and littering the entrance, is sure to be in desperate case. The bees are tearing open every store-cell, casting away the solidified honey as refuse, to get at the moister portion below. If the cold spell does not break, or the bee-master is unready with his artificial supplies, the colony must perish. So the water-bearers watch for the sunshine, and its first warm glance brings them out to rifle the nearest dewdrops, or track down by its bubbling music the hidden woodland stream. Many die at this work in the early months of the year, chilled by their load on the homeward journey, or snapped up by hungry birds. But at every cost the future life of the colony must be assured, though, of all the hive-people, none but the queen-mother will be alive to see it in its summer fulness.