In the study of bee-life one comes upon many questions, but seldom answers to fit all. If the queen’s fecundation takes place only once in her life, and nature intends this to suffice for her whole fruitful period, it is not easy to see why she should go out with the swarm at all. That she is not the inveterate recluse as generally believed, and that she does occasionally make short flights in the open during her laying career, is well proved. The desire, therefore, to see the light again after a long incarceration cannot be urged as her reason for going off with the swarm. A much more plausible notion is that the sexual spirit is again roused in the queen, just as it seems to be roused for the first time in the worker-bee; and that, with all, the journey is undertaken as a mating-flight, a faint re-echo of a racial custom long extinct, bearing the closest analogy to the marriage-swarm from the ant-hill. It must be borne in mind that, although the queen-bee is undoubtedly rendered capable of producing her kind of both sexes during several years, as the result of a single fertilisation, it cannot be incontestably held that she never again meets the drone under any circumstances. There is nothing in her physical organism to prevent a second coition, although with the drone this is impossible, for more reasons than the all-sufficient one—that he dies in his marriage-hour.
In the old bee-gardens, where the “swarm in May” is still a living, present thing, it is pleasant to sit with the proprietor under the rosy shade of apple-boughs waiting for the swarms to issue, and “talking bees,” which is the most nerve-soothing, soul-refreshing occupation in the world. There never was a bee-keeper, new style or old style, too busy to talk, provided that you met him with understanding, and were as impatient as he of digressions from the all-important theme. One soon gets tired of imparting information as to the wonders of hive-life to the ignorant and plainly apprehensive stranger, and none sooner than he of the old school. In the quietest apiary of pure-bred English bees there are always a few individuals of crotchety nature, who will search you out in the shady orchard seat, and, as like as not, knife you on the least provocation. If you are a beeman, you treat these vindictive approaches with unconcern. You go on listening to the old man’s talk, while the bee shrills away at your eyelids, or creeps into your ear and out again. If you keep quiet, she will soon relinquish the dull sport, and wing harmlessly away; and the thread of the master’s discourse is not interrupted. But the uninformed stranger is a nuisance at these solitudes for two. He flinches and shudders; makes little irritating retreats; beats about wildly with his hands; or, if he is made of the sternest metal, he sits rigidly upright when he should be reclining at his ease, and turns such a painfully polite, though distracted, ear to his informant, that the stream of talk is sure to dry up incontinently, and he feels as little welcome as ghostly Banquo at the feast.
When you have once lived among hives it is a sore thing to be without their music. On warm days, winter and summer alike, there is always this drowsy, dreamy song in the air; and dancing without the fiddlers is no more depressing an occupation than, to a beeman, is loitering in a garden of mere silent vegetables and flowers. Sitting now under the bower of apple-blossoms and watching for the swarms, the full sweet note from the hives comes over to you like the very voice of serene content. It pervades the sunshine. It gently qualifies the slow wind in the tree-tops. It lifts and falls like the lilt of a far-off summer sea. This is the labour-song: the song of the swarm is very different. To the trained ear the cæsura that presently comes in the midst of the music is as clear as a pistol-shot, though you may detect no change. The old bee-keeper stops short in his wandering tale about famous honey-years of half a lifetime back, seizes key and pan, and hurries across the garden. It is the old green hive again, he tells you, as you press hard upon his heels—it is always the old green hive that has swarmed the earliest every May for years back. And forthwith the key and pan begin their clattering ding-dong melody.
Old-fashioned bee-keeping is not always a matter of straw. Box-hives, without, of course, the modern inside furniture, have been in use nearly as long as the straw skep; and the hives in the garden are of this ancient pattern. The old green hive is keeping well up to its reputation. Already it is the centre of a swirling crowd of bees, and, as you look, a dense black stream of them is pouring out of the entrance so fast and furiously that it is almost impossible to distinguish what they are. And the old wild trek-song is growing louder and deeper with every moment, a rich vibrant tenor note unlike any other sound in nature. There is no doubt at all of its import, as you stand in the wing-darkened sunshine, caught up in the excitement of it all, and feeling much as if you were facing a tearing sou’-west gale. Every bee of the twenty or thirty thousand volleying madly to and fro overhead, is singing her bravest and loudest. There is only one meaning to the whole gargantuan chorus. It is sheer jubilation melodised: a wild, glad song of freedom, as though not a bee amongst them had ever before set eyes on the sunshine and the wealth of an English May.
The great door-key, a ponderous, antiquated piece of metal, beats out its clanging note, and the swarm lifts higher and higher into the blue. Gradually the sombre mist of bees draws closer together, looking now like a little dark cloud strayed from a forgotten summer storm. Now it sails slowly northward, and lightens, as the sunlight is caught by the beating wings as in a net of silver; and now it veers away into the very eye of the sun, and changes into black, revolving tracery again; whirring wheels within wheels of insect-life, spinning-wheels making thread to weave the garments of a whole nation, and humming as never spinning-wheels hummed before.
But the beginning of the end is nigh; the time of singing is nearly over. The old beeman stops his weird tom-tomming, throws down key and pan, and points to the topmost branch of a young apple-sapling. You see a little black knot of bees clinging to it no larger than a pigeon’s egg. A moment later, and it has grown to the size of a double fist, and another moment sees it twice this size again, as the flying bees stream towards it from all directions. Now it is as big as a quart measure, and the branch is slowly bending down under its weight. In an incredibly short space of time the whole swarm has joined the cluster; they hang together in a long, brown, glistening, cigar-shaped mass, well-nigh touching the ground, and the wild, merry music is over for good.
Gently swaying in the sunlight, lifeless and inert but for a few restless bees that hum about it, the sight of a settled swarm has an almost uncanny effect on most observers. A little before, the whole garden was filled with its deafening, joyous hubbub; now a strange silence has fallen, and it is impossible to dissociate from its present state the idea of an abject depression and disillusionment, as though the whole thing had been but a mad escapade, of which the bees were now heartily ashamed. If we may conceive the issue of a swarm to be a freak of ancestral memory, the sudden irresistible impulse to follow an old racial habit, long obsolete, it is not difficult to account for the obvious change of mind that has now come over the absconding host. Packed within the hive in a feverish, surging multitude, disabilities were not self-evident as they are now, tried in the light of day.
“Violent delights have violent ends,
And, in their triumph, die.”
And now there is the morrow to be thought of: life to be rendered possible in all odds of weather; a home to be made; the queen-mother to be sheltered—she, the one remaining possession of the crowd, beggared now, but so rich a moment before. There is hard work ahead, enough to sober the giddiest among them. The madness has gone as quickly as it came, and now the honey-bee is to show herself a reasoning creature, if never before.