The Lore of the Honey-Bee

by Tickner Edwardes

There is, of course, a great deal of difference between a chance discovery of a wild-bee’s nest, as a common and expected incident in a day’s foraging, and the systematic preservation and tending of beehives as a source of daily food. While it is reasonable to assume that the first men used honey as an article of diet, it is probable that they were a wandering race, never halting for long in the same locality, and therefore unlikely to be bee-keepers in the accepted sense of the word. They depended, no doubt, on the wild honey-stores which they happened to find in their entourage for the time being. But the first sign of civilisation must have been the gradual lessening of this nomadic instinct. Tribes would come to take permanent possession of districts rich in the game, as well as the fruits and tubers, necessary for their daily food. At the same time the haunts of the wild bees would be discovered, their enemies kept down or driven away, the places where the swarms pitched annually noted, and thus the first apiary would have been founded, probably long before any attempt at cultivation of the soil or domestication of the wild creatures for food was made.

Biologists generally regard hunting as the oldest human enterprise under the sun; but, adopting their well-known method of deductive reasoning, it seems possible to make out a rather better case for beemanship in this category. The primæval huntsman must have found much difficulty in bringing down his game, and still more in securing it, when maimed, but yet capable of eluding final capture. For this purpose some sort of retrieving animal, fleeter of foot and more cunning than its master, must have been even more necessary in primæval times than it is in the modern days of the gun. There seems to be no evidence of man indicating the most elementary civilisation without sure signs also that he had trained and used some sort of dog to help him in his daily food-forays. But man must have existed long before civilisation can be said to have come within age-long distance of him. In these times, beset with enemies, he must have built his hut nest-like in some high, impregnable tree, out of reach of night-prowling foes; and it is scarcely conceivable that the dog was his companion under these conditions. More probably he lived, for the most part, on fruits and honey-comb, and such of the small creatures as he could capture with his naked hands. Thus, in all likelihood, the first hunter was a bee-hunter. Eolithic man may have had his own rocky fastness or clump of hollow trees, where the wild bees congregated; and with the coming of each summer he may have followed his swarms through the glades of primæval forests as zealously as any bee-keeper of the present day.

Speculation of this kind is necessarily far-fetched and fantastic, and can be but half seriously undertaken with so small and inconsiderable a creature as the honey-bee. But it is interesting from one special, and not often adopted, point of view. There is no more fascinating study than that of the ancient civilisations of the world. Egypt 10,000 years ago, Babylon probably still earlier, China that seems to have stopped at finite perfection in all ways that matter little, ages before the time of Abraham. But all these are of mushroom growth compared with the antiquity of bee-civilisation. It is only a tale of Lilliput, of a microscopic people living and moving on a mimic stage. Yet, perhaps tens of thousands of years before man had made fire, or chipped a flint into an axe-head, these winged nations had evolved a perfect plan of life, and solved social problems such as are only just beginning to cloud the horizon of human existence in the twentieth century. And they, and their intricate communal polity, have not passed away into dust, as the great human nations of bygone ages have done, and as those of the present day may be destined to do, for all we can tell.

Will a time come when we must learn from the honey-bee or perish? We have still probably a few thousand years wherein to think it out, and prepare for it; but unless the world comes to an end, or human increasing-and-multiplying comes to an end, one earth will eventually become too small to hold us. With this thought in mind, a study of the honey-bee and the arrangements of hive-life, takes on a new interest. Supposing that the political economy of a beehive may be taken as a foreshadowing of the ultimate human state, there is no denying that we get a glimpse into an eminently disquieting state of things, at least from the masculine point of view. We see matriarchy triumphant; the females holding supreme control in the State, and not only initiating all rules of public conduct, but designing and carrying through all public works. The male is reduced to the one indispensable office of sex, and even a single exercise of this is vouchsafed only to a few in a thousand. But to create the large and permanent army of workers necessary in a State such as this, and to recruit it wholly from the females, it became necessary to revise all rules of life from their very foundation. There must have been a great renunciation among the bees, male and female alike, when the resolve was made to leave the whole duty of procreation of their kind to one pair alone of their number—one pair only out of every thirty thousand or so—in order that the rest could devote themselves to ceaseless, sexually unincommoded toil.

This may be imagined as following on a great discovery, an epoch-making discovery, changing the whole face and future of bee-life—how, by the nursing and feeding of the young grub of the female bee, she could be atrophied into a mere, sexless, over-intellectual labourer, or glorified into a creature lacking, it is true, all initiative and almost all mental power, but possessing a body capable of mothering the whole nation. Here is socialistic political economy carried to its sternest, most logical conclusions. All is sacrificed for the good of the State. The individual is nothing: the race is everything. “Thorough” is the motto of the honey-bee, and she drives every theory home to its last notch. Men are pleased to call themselves bee-masters; but the best of them can do no more than study the ways of their bees, learn in what directions it is their will to move, and then try to smooth the way for them. The worker-bees collectively are the whole brains in the business, and the bee-keeper is as much the slave of the conditions and systems they have inaugurated as they are themselves; while the queen-bee is the most willing, and, at certain seasons, the most laborious slave of them all.

It is useless to deny that bee-polity, with its stern dead-reckoning of ingenuity, its merciless adherence to the demands of a system perfected through countless ages, has its unpleasant and even its revolting aspects. Nature is always wonderful, but not always admirable; and a close study of the Life within the Hive brings out this truth perhaps more clearly than with any other form of life, humanity not excepted. Absolute communism implies incidental cruelty: it is only under a system of bland political compromise, of neighbourly give and take, that justice and mercy can ever be yoke-fellows. In the republic of bees, nothing is allowed to persist that is harmful or useless to the general good. Every individual in the hive seems to acquiesce in this common principle—either by choice or compulsion—from the mother-bee down to the last lazy drone, born into the brief plenty of waning summer days. In the height of the honey-flow, the State demands a storehouse filled to the brim; and every bee keeps herself to the task unceasingly until death from overwork comes upon her, and her last load never reaches the hive. If the queen-bee grows old, or her powers of egg-laying prematurely fail, she is ruthlessly slaughtered, and her place filled by another specially raised by the workers to meet this contingency during her lifetime and in her full view. Drones are bred in plenty, plied with the richest provender in the hive, and allowed to wanton through their days of insatiate appetite, so that no young queen may go forth on her nuptial flight unchallenged. But when the last princess is happily mated, and safely home again in the warm, awaiting cluster, every drone is callously done to death, or driven out of the hive to perish. If hard times threaten, or the supply of stores is arrested, the old and worn-out members of the hive are exterminated, breeding is stopped, the unborn young are torn from their cradle-cells and destroyed, so that there may be as few mouths as possible to fill in the lean days to come. The signs of dawning prosperity or adversity are watched for, and the working population of the hive is either increased or checked, just as future probabilities seem to indicate.

But the most bewildering, most uncanny thing of all about this bee-republic is the fact that, in it, has been successfully solved the problem of the balance of the sexes. While all other creatures in the universe bring forth their kind, male and female, in what seems a haphazard, unpremeditated way, these mysterious hive-people cause their queen-mother to give them either sons or daughters according to the needs of the community. They lead her to the drone-cells, and she forthwith deposits eggs that hatch out infallibly as drones; and in the combs specially made wherein to rear the aborted females, the workers, the queen is caused to lay eggs that just as assuredly produce only the worker-bee.

It is the oldest civilisation in the world, this wonderful commonwealth of the bee-people, and it is not unprofitable to examine it in the light of ideas which are at present only flickering up uncertainly on the distant path, but which might well broaden out some day into general conflagration. It is conceivable that a time existed when the conditions of bee-life were very different from those we see to-day. Bees have drawn together into vast communities, just as men are slowly, but surely, gathering into cities. A time may come when individual existence outside the city may be as impracticable for men, as life has become for separate bee-families away from the hive; and then there may arise a purely masculine dilemma. It may be that once the magnificent drone was of real consequence in domestic affairs. Bee-life may have consisted of numberless small families, each with its deep-voiced, ponderous father-bee, its fruitful mother, and its tribe of youngsters growing up, and in time setting forth to establish homes for themselves. There is no reason why each one of the thirty or forty thousand pinched virgins in a hive should not have become a fully developed, prolific queen-bee, if only the right food, in sufficient quantity, had been given her in her larval state. But the need for the single large community arose. The system of a single national mother was instituted. The great renunciation was made, for good or ill. And then the trouble, from the masculine point of view, began.

It must be borne in mind that, strictly speaking, the honey-bee does not, and never did, possess a sting. What is commonly known as her sting is really an ovipositor, and it is as such that it is almost exclusively used by the modern queen-bee in every hive to-day. But when the first hordes of worker-bees were brought into the world, reduced by the science of starvation to little more than sexless sinews and brains, they seemed to have conceived a terrible revenge on their ancestors. The useless ovipositor was turned into a weapon of offence, against which the drone’s magnificent panoply of sound and fury availed him nothing. Matriarchy was established at the point of the living sword. A pitiless logic overran everything. Intolerance of all the bright asides of life—the wine, the dance, the merry talk, and genial tarryings by the path, beloved of all drones, bee or human—darkened the day. And the result is only more honey, a vaster storehouse filled to the brim with never-to-be-tasted sweets, at a cost unfathomable, when the old larder would have sufficed for every real need, and life might still have been merry and leisurely.

It is only a fable, far-fetched, fantastic, as any told to the Caliph in the “Arabian Nights.” But there, again, the woman had her way, like the bee-woman before, and some day she and her kind may get it on a more ambitious scale. And then—what of the sword that was once a sewing-needle?