The Lore of the Honey-Bee

by Tickner Edwardes

The voice of the drone is deeper and hoarser than that of the worker-bee, by reason of his larger body; and his noisier buzzing is explained by his greater length and breadth of wing. The queen also has a deeper, more husky voice during flight; but she has, in addition, a peculiar cry of her own, an old familiar sound to bee-keepers all the world over. It is heard principally just before the swarming of the hive. Certain old skeppists profess to be able to foretell the date on which a swarm will issue by studying the cry of the queen. On quiet nights, just before the swarming-season commences, it may frequently be heard above the general murmur of the hive by bending the ear down to the entrance. It is a shrill piping sound, repeated over and over again, and often answered by other and fainter notes. How it is produced is not certainly known, but probably it is caused by the wings or legs being sharply rubbed together, much as a cricket or grasshopper utters its cry. The louder note is made by the old queen, and there is no doubt of its import. Jealousy and the lust of battle are on her, and she is trying to get at the young princesses in their cells. The cry is one of baffled fury as she strives with the guards about the cells, and the answering notes come from the imprisoned queens who are just as eager for the fray. The old skeppists are never far out in their reckoning. When this state of affairs has begun, the crisis is imminent; and the morrow is sure to see the emigrating party setting off for its new home, carrying the old queen irresistibly with it.

It has been said that the nurse-bees, who have the entire charge and care of the young brood, feed the larvæ from their mouths with a thick white fluid, which is aptly called bee-milk. All the time the nurses are engaged on this work, they are themselves hearty eaters of both honey and pollen; so that at first sight it appears as if the bee had the power of instantaneous digestion, feeding herself at one moment, and, at the next, regurgitating this food, changed into a totally different substance, to feed the young grubs. Moreover, there is another wonderful thing regarding this bee-milk. It has been proved by careful analysis that its composition varies considerably. The male, female, and queen-larvæ are all fed with it, but its constitution differs, not only with each kind of larva, but according to the age the larva has reached. The bee must therefore have her whole system of digestion under full voluntary control. How she manages this critical part of her work can only be understood by the aid of a good microscope.

Perhaps there is nothing more wonderful, in the whole wonderful anatomy of the bee, than her digestive organism and its contributory system of glands, each of which has its special and important use. When she draws up the nectar from the flowers, it passes at once into the first of her two stomachs, which is simply and solely a reservoir. Here it can remain indefinitely at the will of the bee; or it can be thrown up and poured into the comb-cells, to be brewed into honey; or it can be allowed to pass through a valve at the base of the reservoir into the bee’s second and lower stomach, where digestion takes place and the honey and pollen are formed into chyle. But, by one of the most ingenious devices in nature, this second stomach is also capable of returning its contents to the mouth, and the chyle is there changed into bee-milk for the nourishment of the larvæ.

The worker-bee has, in all, four distinct glands, each secreting a fluid with properties different from the other three. These glands are all situated in the mouth. Two of them have a common opening in the upper side of the root of the tongue; and as the bee sucks, their combined secretions mingle with the flower juices automatically, and the first step in the change of the nectar into honey takes place. The third gland is in the roof of the mouth, and it is the secretion from this gland which acts on the regurgitated chyle, and changes it into brood-food. The fourth gland is double. These twin-glands have their openings at the base of the jaws, and the action of chewing is necessary to excite their secretion.

The valve between the upper, or honey-stomach, and the lower, or chyle-stomach, has an extensible neck, and the bee can, at will, raise this telescopic piece through the interior of the honey-sac until the valve is pressed against the opening into the gullet. Thus the contents of the lower stomach can be driven into the mouth without coming into contact with the stored sweets in the reservoir, and this pre-digested matter is always ready at an instant’s notice for the use of the larva, or for the nourishment of drones or queen.

It has been said that the nursery-work of the hive is undertaken exclusively by the young bees during the first fortnight or so of their lives. After this time they make their first foraging expedition, beginning with pollen-gathering, and relinquishing this in turn for the collection of nectar when they have arrived at full maturity. The mature workers take no part in the feeding of the larvæ, except on very rare emergencies. In relation to this, it is a curious fact that the gland in the roof of the mouth, which acts on the chyle, forming it into brood-food, is in full development only during the first weeks of the worker-bee’s career. After that its activity swiftly declines, until, in old workers, it becomes largely atrophied.

The digestive gland-system of the honey-bee, although it has been fairly well explored by the scientific naturalists, is still much of a mystery, and this especially with regard to the glands attached to the jaws. The secretion from these glands—obviously a very powerful acid—is mainly used to convert the raw wax from its hard, brittle character into the soft, ductile material of which the combs are made. It is probably used to some extent, also, in the preparation of the brood-food, in conjunction with the gland in the roof of the mouth. It mingles with the pollen when this is masticated, and no doubt it has various other uses; but no one seems as yet to have discovered why these two glands should be so enormously developed in the queen, who takes no part in the nursery-work or comb-building. The whole question will naturally have little more than a passing interest for the general reader; but, to the bee-keeper with a microscope, it takes a prominent place among the debatable things in hive-life. If the difference between the queen-bee and the worker-bee—a difference of organic structure as well as mere development—is really brought about by variation in the quality and quantity of the food supplied to the larva, then the action of these glands cannot be over-estimated in importance, and cannot be studied too deeply: they form the very spring and fount of life. Yet is it certain that the influence brought to bear on the young grubs by the nurse-bees is wholly restricted to the matter of food? The worker-bee has several curious organs and gland-systems in various parts of her body, in addition to those already enumerated, to which no rational use has yet been assigned. The more we study her extraordinary equipment, the less justification there appears to be for dogmatising about her, limiting or particularising the function of any one gland or implement in the whole unending array. The old adage, that there is nothing invariable about the honey-bee, is like to be as true with regard to her physiology as it is with her habits of life; and, for all we can tell, to-morrow’s knowledge may render obsolete much of the carefully garnered knowledge of to-day.

If the story of the honey-bee’s anatomy has everywhere some of the elements of romance about it—in its unexpected incidents, its adventurous colour, its shadow of a great design—this spirit suffers no abatement when we come, in a last view of it, to consider her as one carrying arms, one bearing such a weapon of offence as never came into human mind to fashion. The long curved scimitar of the queen, which she cherishes so carefully that nothing will induce her to strike with it except when it is to be turned against a royal foe, is otherwise little else than a harmless piece of domestic furniture. But the sting of the valorous worker-bee, seen under a microscope, is a positively terrifying engine of destruction. Popular science generally describes it as a sheath containing a barbed and poisonous dart; and the trite comparison is always made of the bee’s sting with the finest sewing-needle, the latter being likened to a rough bar of iron. The idea of a sheath is pure fiction, as a little painstaking examination will soon reveal.

The bee’s sting is made up of three separate lances, each with a barbed edge, and each capable of being thrust forward independently of the others. The central and broader lance has a hollow face, furnished at each side with a rail, or beading, which runs its whole length. On the back of each of the other two lances there is a longitudinal groove, and into these grooves fit the raised beadings of the central lancet. Thus the sting is like a sword with three blades—united, but sliding upon one another—the barbed points of which continue to advance alternately into the wound, going ever deeper and deeper of their own malice aforethought after the initial thrust is made. It is a device of war, compared to which the explosive bullet is but a clumsy brutality. Yet this is not all. To make its death-dealing powers doubly sure, this thorough-minded amazon must fill the haft of her triple blade with a subtle poison, and so contrive its sliding mechanism that the same impulse, which drives the points successively forward, drenches the whole weapon with a fatal juice.