The tendency to be unduly scientific, to meet these things with exact and unimaginative interest, receives its final quietus here. For he who realises the whole deadly efficacy of the honey-bee’s sting cannot logically pass it by as a mere remarkable provision of nature, praising God for it complacently, but must concede it a much wider significance. This complicated weapon of the stunted, sex-perverted worker-bee owes its existence as much to deliberate art as to nature, or those who watch the Omnipotent in hive-life are strangely and perversely led astray. In the queen-mother, whose physical organism may be said to be comparatively unchanged from its aboriginal type, we see the part corresponding to the worker’s sting, essentially another creation. The queen’s ovipositor is longer; it is curved; the barbs upon it are small and insignificant; the fluid in the secreting-gland is no poison at all, but a thick opaque substance, whose true use is probably to glue the eggs safely to the bottoms of the cells. She is also provided with a pair of blunt instruments covered with sensitive hairs, which serve, with the ovipositor, to guide the egg securely to its destination. The worker-bee has these feelers on either side of her sting, but she has perverted them to a very different office, that of seeking out the vulnerable parts of her enemy. And what a drastic change her will, or that of her foster-mothers, has wrought in the whole contrivance! She has bartered the privilege of motherhood and years of life for a few short months and a share in the communal sovereignty. She must be ready to further the well-being of the hive by the art of war as well as by the arts of peace. Therefore she has deliberately helped in fashioning the ploughshares into cannon. A little change in her food as a nursling, an infinitesimal leaking from a gland that takes the full power of the strongest glass to see,—and, with all the other multitudinous changes of form and character, this last miracle comes quietly into being. The egg-depositing shaft grows short and straight; its moderate indentations become cruel jagged barbs designed to hold as well as to kill; the harmless, egg-fastening gluten is quickened into a virulent poison; and the death-dealing thing is ready and ripe for service against all honey-lovers, the hereditary foes of the hive.
CHAPTER XI
THE MYSTERY OF THE SWARM
The old “swarm in May,” beloved of ancient beemen, is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Modern hives and modern methods, although they have not as yet achieved their main intent of abolishing natural swarming altogether, yet tend to bring this extraordinary ebullition of hive-life to its fulfilment later and later in each year. Far from being a virtue, as of old, an early swarm, or indeed any swarm at all, is now accounted a misfortune, even a downright disgrace, in scientific beemanship. And yet the bees, though easy to discourage, are hard to teach. In spite of roomy hives and a watchful bee-master ready to give them an unbroken succession of young and fertile queens, and a whole houseful of new furniture at a moment’s notice, still the bees go on playing this mad game of wholesale truantry, and still the bee-keeper must stand looking hopelessly on from the midst of his elaborate appliances, while his property sings about his ears, or wings away into the upper skies, irrevocable as last year’s mill-water.
Beemen call it the swarming fever; and fever it is in very truth. The reasons for it have long ago been crystallised into exact and accepted phrases. An overcrowded condition of the hive; the desire of the bees to get rid of a failing queen; the excitement of the queen herself at the menace of coming rivals; the natural instinct of colonies to increase and multiply—anything but the one all-sufficient and obvious reason, that bees swarm because they suddenly and intensely desire it.
The story of the Sioux Indian,—won for civilisation from boyhood, over-educated and overrefined, decorated with a high college-degree and adorning a great pulpit, and then casting it all to the four winds, stripping and painting himself, and raging away with his kind on the war-trail,—has a near parallel in the behaviour of bees at swarming-time. Instinct could never be a party to such an inconsequent, outrageous, brilliantly reckless, joyous proceeding. But it is ever in the way of reason to be splendidly unreasonable at times, and here the honey-bee shows herself the true child of her origins. From a stern, self-elected destiny-maker, callously pressing to the forefront of life over all obstacles of heart and hearth, she changes back, for the nonce, into the aboriginal bee-woman, thoughtless, pleasure-loving, improvident, spending the garnered treasure of laborious days in the one mad moment’s frolic.
For it is impossible to regard the incident of the swarm as only one more link in the chain of sober, calculating bee-wisdom. It is obviously a lapse, a general falling away from the all-wise, public polity. For a single hour in her drudging, joyless, perfect life, the worker-bee battens down all the virtues, and rages forth like the Sioux Indian to swill at the stream of forbidden love and laughter, unmindful of the cost. Just when the common self-abnegation is yielding its rich first-fruits of prosperity, and the hive is overflowing with its wealth of citizens and possessions, this fever comes among them, and spreads like a prairie fire. By all laws of prudence it is now, of all times, that every child of the Mother-State should stand by her mightily, to uphold her in the high place won for her by unending toil and innumerable lives. But old ancestral memory wakens, calling irresistibly. Nature, in the beginning of time, made the honey-bee to inhabit a tropic land, where there was no need for pent, cold-withstanding houses, nor any use in laying up provender for days of dearth, because the land flowed with perpetual honey. Bee-life in those far-off ages was all dancing in the sunshine, and the bee-woman had little to do but to fly to the nearest brimming flower-cup when her nurslings wanted food, But a cooling world, the ever northward trend of her race, and then the folly of her own wisdom—intellect turning upon itself—all combined to lose for her the old slothful paradise of plenty. The drone, reasoning inversely by the wisdom of his folly, made a better compromise with fate. He held to his life of ease and his gratuitous pleasures at all cost, and let his mate go her way undeterred, blinding his eyes to the new necessities. Work and responsibility gradually soured and sharpened and hardened the one, while dependence on his womenkind as insidiously changed the other into a creature of idleness and the senses. And when he came at last to realise the outcome of it all, it was too late. The matriarchal commonwealth was established, hedged round securely with a myriad poisoned blades. To live a drone had been his heart’s desire, and now dronehood, mere seminality, was allotted to him as a retribution. The things for which man lifts his unregarded prayer all his life through, might very well prove his fittest punishment, granted to him in the Hereafter: so little can man or drone distinguish between the enduring things of life and death.
But of all intolerable fates, that must be least bearable, to have wisely willed and beautifully fashioned our own eternity; and then, being only human, or at least reasonable, to find its goodness really smooth-going, colour-fast, impregnable at all points, with never a bright break or flaw to vary the monotony of well-doing. No wonder the honey-bee swarms, breaks helter-skelter out of her prison-bounds of order, commendable toil, chill, maidenly propriety; and goes rioting away for one short hour of joyousness and madcap frolic, such as her primæval sisters looked to as the common day’s lot, when there were no hives, and motherhood was not the sole prerogative of one in thirty thousand, and when the sun burned high and cheerily in heaven from end to end of the tropic year. It is easy to be wise, and temperately scientific, in accounting for this feverish impulse of the worker-bees, allotting it a sound and circumspect part in the furtherance of the general polity. But is it not, in the main, Nature—the atrophied sexual spirit—awakening, or at least stirring a little in her age-long sleep? In the sultry August evenings the young queens of the ant-hills pour out in unnumbered thousands to meet the males, and people the ruddy sunshine with the glint of their wings. This is swarming in its truest sense. The wingless, workful, underground existence follows, but the love-flight of the ants, while it lasts, is none the less a real, intensely joyous thing. And surely the swarming-fever that so strangely and inopportunely seizes upon hive-life, is at one with it in nature and spirit, although its original purpose and value have been long ago lost in the ages.
The one in the whole multitude who alone has the full inheritance of her sex, the queen-bee, seems often at the fountain-head of the revolution. Sometimes, undoubtedly, it is she who first develops this longing, feverish unrest, and by little and little communicates it to the whole colony. Here the variability of bee-nature comes sharply into evidence. Some hives will show this restless spirit for many days before the swarm issues, while with others the great upheaval seems, as far as the mass of bees is concerned, to be a sudden unpremeditated thing occurring in the midst of the universal content and industry. The preparations for raising new queens are always taken in hand betimes, but probably this is the work of the far-seeing, sober old bees of the hive, with whom communism has become a settled and accepted calamity. The bees who will ultimately constitute the swarm may be supposed to nourish their secret desires from the first moment the queen shows signs of mutability; to neglect all their old tasks, first in heart and then in reality; and finally—when the queen’s mood has reached its culminating point, and her work in the hive is in virtual abeyance—to throw down plummet and trowel and hod, and rush forth in a wild, hilarious company, urged by a longing that they are as powerless to resist as to understand.