The Lore of the Honey-Bee

by Tickner Edwardes

In the case of the young queen-larva, however, a very different policy is instituted from the beginning. Not only is she given nursery-quarters allowing every facility for growth, but she is loaded with a specially rich kind of food night and day, until she actually swims in it. The nurse-bees are constantly pouring this glistening white substance into the cell for the whole five days of her larval existence, and the effect of this generous diet is obvious from the first in her more rapid growth, as compared with the worker-bee. A further advantage still is that the young queen has perfectly free access to the air at all stages of her development. The worker-cell is but sparsely ventilated, and that only through the narrow top, all its six sides and base being absolutely impervious. But the cradle-cell of the queen is not only made of a porous material throughout, but it is commonly placed at the edge of the comb, where it stand out in the full current of ventilation, the air percolating the whole substance of its walls in addition to entering freely at the large cell-mouth. Thus the main cause of the extraordinary difference in the development of the queen-bee and the worker is that of treatment; the one being given unlimited rich food and oxygen and room to grow in, the other receiving only meagre workhouse diet, restricted quarters, and little air to breathe.

Yet, making every allowance for the stimulating or retarding effect of these agencies on the young female grub, we are still hardly any nearer to solution of the mystery. We are compelled to believe that the egg which produces the worker is identical in its nature with that from which is evolved the queen-bee, because a simple experiment will at once dispel all doubt on the matter. If the egg deposited in the queen-cell be removed and an egg taken from any one of the thousand of worker-cells in a hive be put in its place, the worker-egg will always produce a fully developed and accoutred queen-bee. On the other hand, if an egg be taken from a queen-cell and placed in a worker-cell, it will as infallibly hatch out into a common undersized worker. It would be sufficient tax on the credibility if the differences of queen and worker were only those of degree. If the queen were nothing but a large-sized worker-bee, in whom certain organs—which were atrophied in the worker—had received their full development, it would be a fact within comprehension; but the queen differs from the worker not only in size and the capability of her organism, but also on several important points of structure. And how can mere food and air and circumstance produce structural change? The worker has many bodily appliances, special members ingeniously adapted to her daily tasks, of which the queen is wholly destitute; while the physical organism of the queen varies from that of the worker in several important degrees.

Some of these must be enumerated. The abdomen of the worker is comparatively short and rounded: that of the queen is larger and longer, and comes to a fairly sharp point. The jaws of the queen are notched on their inner cutting edge: the worker’s jaws are smooth like the edge of a knife. The tongue of the worker has a spatula at its extremity, and is furnished with sensitive hairs: the tongue of the queen is shorter, the spatula is smaller, while the hairs show greater length. The worker-bee has a complicated system of wax-secreting discs under the horny plates of her abdomen: in the queen these are absent, nor can the most elementary trace of them be discovered. In their nerve-systems the two show difference, the queen possessing only four abdominal ganglia, while the worker has five. The queen’s sting is curved, and longer than the worker’s: the sting of the worker-bee is perfectly straight. On their hind-legs the workers have a curious contrivance which bee-keepers have named the pollen-basket. It is a hollowing of the thigh, the cavity being surrounded with stiff hairs; and within this the pollen is packed and carried home to the hive. In the queen both the cavity and the hairs are absent. Her colour also is generally different from that of the worker-bee, her legs, in particular, being a much redder brown.

Here is a problem for our great biologists—a problem, however, at which the plain, every-day man may well flinch. For we seem to have come face to face with new principles of organic life, facts incompatible with the accepted ideas of the inevitable relation between cause and effect. The irresistible tendency at this stage is to hark back; to repeat the experiment of the transposed eggs, and see whether no vital, initial circumstance has been overlooked. But the result is always the same. Nor can the most careful microscopical dissection of the eggs themselves reveal any differences. In this mystery of the structural variance between queen and worker, it would seem that we are forced to accept one of three alternatives. Either the egg contains two distinct germs of life, one developing only under the stress of hard times, the other only to the call of luxury. Or we must go back to mediæval notions, and believe that the worker-bees give or withhold some vital principle of their own during nurturing operations. Or we must give up the problem, and decide that creation works on lines very different from those on which we have hitherto grounded our faith.

The difficulty is further complicated by the fact that this change of nature does not take place until relatively late in the life of the bee. The egg is three days in hatching. But the young larva is at least three more days old before nature has made the irrevocable step along either of the divergent ways. For the experiment of transposition can be made with exactly the same result if undertaken with female bee-larvæ not more than three days old, instead of the unhatched eggs. Indeed, this is an operation that the nurse-bees themselves perform, on occasion. If a hive loses its queen, and it happens that all the eggs in the worker-cells are hatched out, the bees will breed another queen from any one of the worker-larva available. This is generally successful when the young grub has not passed the three days’ limit. But, even when all the larvæ of the hive are older than this, the bees will still attempt the task, knowing well that, without a queen, the colony must perish. In this case, however, the resulting queen will be defective in various ways. Probably she will never be capable of fertilisation, and therefore the breed of worker-bees will be cut off at its source. Unless the bee-master supplies the colony with a new queen, properly fecundated, the hive will gradually fill up with drones, the old worker-bees will die off, and the stock must ultimately become extinct.

When once the study of the inner life of the honey-bee has been undertaken, the watcher will soon realise that he has embarked on a stranger voyage than he ever contemplated, even in his most daring moments. In the old bee-garden there was a serenity, a quiet enduring bliss of ignorance, that chimed in well with his slothful, holiday mood. The sunshine, the flowers, the song of the wind in the tree-tops, and the drowsy song of the hives; the voice of the old white-headed cottager weaving in his listener’s ear the old, comfortable arabesque of error; the sudden, jubilant uproar of a swarm, filling the blue sky with music and the flash of unnumbered wings; the night-quiet, with its deep underground bee-murmur, its dim half-moon peering over the hill-top, the shadowy bent figure of the old beeman listening at hive-doors for the battle-cry of rival queens, that should mean trouble on the morrow—it all comes back to the watcher now as a haven he has left inconsiderately, for a voyage over unknown, stormy seas. For now, with the inner life of the hive going on unmasked before his very eyes, wonder succeeds wonder almost without a break; and each new fact that reveals itself is more perturbing, because more destructive of old, hallowed convention, than any that has gone before.

The hive that has lost its mother-bee, and failed to provide her with a fully developed, fertile successor, is seen to be rapidly declining in its worker-population, while the horde of drones is increasing at a greater rate than ever. But where do these drones come from, if the very fount of bee-life has been dried up at its source by the loss of a fertilised queen? The question brings the student to what is perhaps the most remarkable fact in the whole great book of natural history.

We are not concerned, for the moment, with theological matters; nor will the thread of the story of the honey-bee be laid down, however briefly, for an excursion into the pulpit. Yet here is something that may well give wherewithal for thought. For nearly two thousand years the Doctrine of the Virgin Birth has been the centre of a bitter human controversy. Its liegemen uphold it as a main article of faith, eternally exalted from the odious need of proof; its temperate opposers sadly and quietly set it aside as a natural impossibility. On one side the charge is want of faith; on the other of blind credulity. And yet no one seems to have thought of looking into paths of creation other than human, to see if no parallel exists that may help both sides, and send the swords to sheath before a common mystery. The honey-bee is small among the fowls, but here she looms large in the world, a portentous symbol. It is a fact, now incontestably proved, that the virgin queen-bee is capable of reproducing her kind, yet only the male of the species. If she is born late in the year, when no drones exist, and her fertilisation is therefore impossible, or if some imperfection of wing prevents her going out for her mating-flight, she will still set busily to work at her one function of egg-laying; and these eggs will all hatch out into male bees. The same thing occurs in the case of the queenless hive, which, having neither worker-egg nor worker-grub, whose age is under the three days’ limit, yet tries to raise a new queen from a larva perhaps four or even five days old. The queen thus created is queen only in name. She may have her ovaries completely developed, but otherwise she will be congenitally destitute. She will have neither the will nor power to receive the drone; and the eggs that she lays so industriously only add to the crowd of useless males that will soon be the sole representatives of the doomed household.

Following the progress of a bee-colony through the mounting days of spring, we see, with every week that passes, a larger area of comb occupied by the young worker-brood; while about the middle of April the queen pays her first visit to the drone-combs, laying a single egg in each cell, as with the rest. It is commonly supposed that the queen is always surrounded by an adulatory retinue, each attendant bee keeping her head respectfully towards her sovereign, and backing before her as she progresses over the combs. Something of this sort is constantly seen during breeding-time, but at other seasons the queen ordinarily receives little attention, passing to and fro in the hive with no more ceremony than is bestowed on any other of the bees. The mediæval writers were aware that the queen had these attendants, and believed them always to be twelve in number, representing the twelve Apostles. A little observation, however, will soon make it clear that the bees which surround the queen on her egg-laying journeys are neither devotees nor courtiers. They are actually her guides, her keepers. The queen’s movements are all prompted by the incessant strokings and pushings and gentle touches of the antennæ that she receives from these. Thus they allow her free passage over the combs, but stop her at each vacant cell, gathering close about her, evidently with the most absorbing anxiety and interest in the operation. First, she peers into the cell, examining it carefully. Then she rears; the bees give way before her; she takes a step or two onward until the end of her body is over the cell. And then she thrusts her abdomen deep into it, pauses a moment, mounts again upon the comb, and the attendant bees at once resume charge of her, and manœuvre her towards the next empty cell. This process never seems hurried, and yet in the height of the breeding season it must go on at an extraordinary pace. It is well attested that a good queen will thus furnish as many as two thousand to three thousand cells in a day, which gives an average of two eggs a minute, even supposing her to keep at the work without pause for the whole twenty-four hours.