In the heat and glow of the fine June morning you may see her, the young virgin queen, making ready for her nuptial flight.
At first she is all hesitancy; wandering to and fro amidst the crowd on the hive-threshold; coquetting with the sunshine; loath to return to the dim, pent, murmurous twilight she has forsaken, yet hardly daring to launch herself on wings that are still untried.
For three long days and nights since her release from the prison-cell she has been a curiously solitary figure in the busy throng within the hive. Instead of the enthusiastic, welcoming world she expected, she finds none but unregarding strangers about her. Not a drone glances her way, and the worker-bees go upon their business in seeming unconcern at her presence. They do not even trouble themselves to feed her, and she is left to forage for herself as best she may. A conspiracy of indifference is on the clan—all part of a deep design for her education, if she only knew it, but singularly damping to the ardours, and great ideas of destiny, that gather within her day by day. At length the call comes for which all are secretly waiting, and obeying irresistibly, she presses out into the light.
As she stands hesitating, the hot June sun falls upon her, laving her in molten gold. The blue sky beckons her upward. All the world of colour and incense and life calls her to her wooing, and she must needs obey. With a little glad flutter of the wings, she breaks at last from the scrambling company about her, and soars up into the light.
Warily now she hovers, taking careful stock of her home and its surroundings. Then round and round, in ever widening and lifting circles, each sweep upward giving her a broader view of the world that lies beyond. And then away into the blue sky so swiftly that no human eye can follow; yet only for a short flight. She is back again now, almost before you have missed her, and hurrying, frightened at her own audacity, into the old safe gloom of the hive.
Thus she dallies, to and fro between the sunshine and the darkness, each time adventuring a little farther into the blue playground of the upper air, until at length the inevitable comes to pass. A great drone—one of the roistering crowd that fills the bee-garden with its hoarse noontide music—spies her, and gives instant chase. At sight of him she wheels, and darts away into the sunshine at lightning speed. Yet the first drone has hardly stretched a wing before another is after him, and still another. Thick and fast from all points they gather for the race, until the fleeing queen has drawn a whole bevy of them, streaming like a little grey cloud behind her. This much you can see as you strain your eyes in their track; but in a moment quarry and huntsmen have vanished together, volleying, as it seemed, straight up into the farthermost skies.
From her birth to the day when that terrible, living cordon closes about her, almost the whole life of the queen-bee can be followed step by step. Only this one moment of her bridal stands unrevealed, and perhaps for ever unrevealable, to human eyes. You can picture to yourself the wild chevy-chase through the clear June air and sunshine; you can give, in fancy, the prize to the strongest and the fleetest; but all you will know for certain is that in a little while the queen returns to the hive, sobered and solitary, trailing behind her infallible evidence of her impregnation and the death of the victorious drone. She has been the bride of a moment; now she is to be the widow of a lifetime. Henceforward her days are to be spent in the twilight cloisters of the hive, flying abroad so rarely that many an old experienced beeman will say she comes forth only once a year when she leads a swarm. But in her body now she carries the seed from which will spring up a whole nation. Before her marriage-flight she was the least considered of all the colony; now she is welcomed home with public ovation; lauded, fed, and fondled; set up in the high place, a living symbol of the tens of thousands unborn. As in olden, savage times, the royal festivals had their human sacrifices, so this paramount day in the perfected communism of the bee-people must vent its rejoicing in slaughter. But it is not tribute of common slaves that is now to redden the State-shambles, nor will the work fall to the common executioner’s knife. There are captive queens in the citadel—a royal sacrifice ready to hand, and a royal blade hungering for the task. Once the queen has proved her intrinsic motherhood, and the first few worker-eggs have been laid in the comb, the guards will stand away from the royal prison-cells and let her wreak her will upon them. It is all very ghastly in a miniature way, yet very queenly, as old traditions of human queenhood go. She gives over her nursery-work gladly enough for a moment, and flies to the slaughter, tearing down the prison-doors, and putting each clamorous captive fiercely to the sword.
Apart from this tragic element of sororicide, quickly over and soon forgotten in the general rejoicing, there is true romance in the early life-story of the Queen of the Bees—bridehood, wifehood, widowhood, following hard upon each other, all in the space of a single hour. But in the details of her common everyday life that succeed this tense period, above all in the wonderful structure of her body and its functions, there is greater romance still. That she has but a single commerce with the drone, and thereafter is exalted to perpetual fecundity; that, through her, sons and daughters can be given to the hive in just the proportion needed for the good of the State, or that increase of population can be wholly arrested at will, are facts to be accredited only after sure knowledge. And to understand how these results are brought about, it is necessary to learn something of the anatomy, as well as the manner of fecundation, of the mother-bee.
In the first place, as fertilisation of the one sex by the other is usually regarded, the queen-bee is not fertilised at all. The vital essence of the drone does not penetrate the ovaries of the queen, but passes immediately after coition into a receptacle specially provided for it, where it is stored, and its effectiveness preserved, during nearly the whole lifetime of the queen. It has been shown that the virgin queen is able to lay eggs from which only drones, or male bees, originate. The fecundated queen, however, can lay both male and female eggs, and she has the power of depositing either kind when and wherever she wills. The whole thing, amazing as it is, and far-reaching in its results, has, like many other extraordinary devices in nature, a simple explanation. The gland wherein is stored the male life-essence, can be opened or closed at the will of the mother-bee, or rather, as will be shown, according to circumstances that for the moment involuntarily but inexorably guide her. When she is brought to the large drone-cell, this gland remains shut, and the egg escapes without contact with its contents. But at the narrow worker-cells the gland in the oviduct is opened, and the egg, in passing, absorbs some of its containing germs. Thus only the female bee is born of the union of the two parents; the male bee is the offspring of mother alone.
Of this primal incident, the parthenogenesis, or birth of the fully equipped male from the virgin female, little more can be said than that it is a well-ascertained fact of nature, exemplified in several other insects beside the honey-bee. But while we are witnessing the part played in the hive by the fecundated queen, with her elaborate organism, much is to be noted; and here we really get the master-key to a right understanding of the whole system of bee-government. It would be an anomaly if the highest, most important functions of the State had been entrusted solely to the queen, whose feeble intelligence renders her, of all others, least likely to execute them properly; and we find, in fact, that no such reliance is placed on her. The worker-bees, who take her in charge on her return from her mating-flight, henceforth originate her every act and impulse. It has already been seen how she is led from cell to cell over the combs; how she is caused to lay, in earliest spring, only a few eggs a day, while in the summer she may produce several thousand; and how her output may be checked or augmented at any point between. Now we are to realise how it is all brought about; or, at least, bring conjecture as near to certainty as may be with so difficult a theme.