The Lore of the Honey-Bee

by Tickner Edwardes

It is believed by most bee-keepers that a swarm selects the site of its future dwelling some time before the expedition starts, in many cases several days earlier. An old trick among cottagers is to place out empty hives in their gardens, and these not uncommonly attract errant swarms. A few bees are seen cruising about, and subjecting the hives to a close scrutiny. These pioneer bees disappear, and after a variable time, from a few minutes to a few hours, or even days, a whole army of bees suddenly descends from the sky and takes possession of the new home. When the interval between the appearance of the scouts and the arrival of the main body, is only a short one, the reconnoitring bees have been manifestly sent out by the clustered swarm; but in the case of long periods elapsing, the scouts must have been sent in search of the new location before the swarm issued. Probably, although the bulk of the party is imbued with this reckless spirit alone, thinking and caring for nothing else but the escape and the frolic, many of the older and wiser bees undertake the matter in a temperate, businesslike way, as they would go about any other important hive-operation. In one sense, therefore, the old notion of there being “subordinate lieutenants, captains, and governours” in a hive may not be so very far from the truth. That these scouts are actually sent out to find a suitable site for the new colony, either before the swarm leaves or while it is clustered in the open, is a well-established fact, so that some of the bees at least must keep their wits about them throughout the general chaos.

And with these wiser virgins must be reckoned the queen, in spite of the fact that she joins in the public excitement and restlessness. For some days before the great emigration her work of egg-laying is largely arrested, and this retentive action renders her so heavy and bulky that often she can scarcely get on the wing. The object of this is that she may be all the more ready for laying when the new home is established. It is also well ascertained that all swarming bees have their honey-sacs well filled, and this loading up for the journey takes place just before the signal for departure is given. There is great variation in the behaviour of the different stocks in a bee-garden during the swarming season, and many close observers are unable to detect any sure signs that a particular hive is going to swarm. But it appears fairly well established that, when a swarm is imminent, nearly all the bees of that stock remain at home, even when all other hives in the garden are in full foraging activity. Such a hive gives out a peculiar throbbing note, which suggests the noise made by a powerful locomotive brought to a standstill, but with full steam up, and impatient to be gone. Just before the issue of the swarm there is often a curious lull in this pent-up, forceful sound, and probably this is the moment when the travellers are lading themselves up for the march. Immediately after—and here it is difficult not to believe that a definite, authoritative signal for the movement is given—a sudden stir and tumult begins in the centre of the crowded hive, much like that caused by a heavy stone cast into water. This radiates swiftly in all directions until it reaches the bees near the entrance, and then the general rush for the daylight starts. Where a hive is much overcrowded there will already be a cluster of bees numbering many thousands packed tightly together on the alighting-board, and sometimes covering the whole face of the hive. But this mass melts away directly the swarming begins, the waiting bees taking wing all but simultaneously with the others.

It was anciently believed that the queen led the swarm, but this view is not borne out by modern observation. As often as not half the bees are on the wing before she makes her appearance, and sometimes she is among the very latest to leave, or she may decide at the last moment not to go at all. In this case the bees do not cluster, but after a few minutes’ wild tarantelle in the sunshine they all troop back to the hive.

When once the swarming-party has gone off, the old hive seems to settle down to its ordinary occupations as though nothing out of the way had happened. The congested state of affairs no longer exists, but otherwise the work of the hive is proceeding in the usual way. The bees left behind are mainly young workers who have not yet commenced foraging, but there is always a fair sprinkling of old workers and drones. Generally the hive is queenless for the time being, the new queen not having yet broken from her cell. There may be four or five queen-cells in various stages of development, or rarely as many as a dozen. Sometimes, however, the first of the queens will be already hatched and wandering over the combs, meeting, as usual at this stage of her career, perfect indifference from all she encounters. But hives have been known to send off a swarm when the preparations for raising a new queen have been scarcely begun. So variable is the honey-bee in all her ways.

If the objects of swarming were merely to relieve the congestion in the hive, and to change the mother-bee, the whole thing should now be at an end. But the swarming impulse is rooted in far deeper soil than mere expediency. With some strains of bees the fever seems to die out after the one attack, and the stock settles down quietly to work for the rest of the season. But more often than not this first taste of adventure serves only to whet the national appetite for more. About nine days after the first swarm leaves another swarm often follows, and this may be succeeded by a third or even a fourth at a few days’ interval, resulting in some cases in the almost complete extinction of the stock. The old skeppists called the second swarm a “cast,” the third was a “colt,” and the fourth a “filly.” It is difficult to understand how, in a community where individual interest is so ruthlessly sacrificed to the general good, this self-destructive policy should be permitted. But taking the view that swarming is in the main a vague and incomplete resurrection of a long obsolete habit in bee-life, a workable theory at once suggests itself. Under primæval conditions the continued life of the mother-colony may have been unnecessary. Its purpose may have been fully served when a number of young queens and drones had been raised, and the whole had swarmed out together, each to form a new settlement. It must be remembered that the bee-hive, persisting indefinitely from year to year, is really quite a modern creation, and became practicable only with the invention of the movable comb-frame, which allowed the bee-master to effect the renewal of combs. It has been seen that the brood-combs get gradually choked up with the pupa-cocoons, which each bee leaves behind it. These webs are so incredibly thin that a dozen of them make little appreciable difference to the capacity of the cell, and combs have been known to remain in use for brood-raising as long as twenty years. But eventually they must become useless; and then, as bees do not, or cannot, remove old combs to make way for new, the community must leave for a new home, or gradually die out. Thus the age of the old hives was definitely limited.

Modern beemanship has wrought many other changes in the life of the honey-bee in addition to creating the permanent hive-city. The number of bees in a single strong stock, housed in a modern frame hive, is probably three times as great as that of a wild colony. The work of the bee-master affects almost every aspect of bee-life, enlarging the scale and the scope of all that the bees attempt. The result of this is seen not only in an increased population and more extensive works, but in a change in the very systems of life. Plans that work very well on a small scale do not always succeed on a large. The sanitary problems of a city are necessarily very different from those of a village, in principle as well as in degree. And probably much of the ingenuity of system and device observable in modern hive-life is directly due to human agency, the new conditions introduced by the bee-master serving to educate the bees to greater effort and resource.

The behaviour of these after-swarms offers a curious contrast to that of the first one. If it were possible to point to one fixed and invariable law in bee-life, it would be to the fact that a prime swarm will leave the hive only on a fine, warm day, and generally about noon. But casts and colts and fillies seem to take no count of time or weather, issuing just as the mood besets them, early or late, and caring nothing, apparently, for the conditions abroad. It is even on record that once a second swarm came off at midnight, when the moon was at the full and the weather very clear and warm.

There seems altogether much more method in the madness that seizes on a colony swarming for the first time, and if thereafter the hive settles down to its old courses, the national character for sobriety and industry soon rehabilitates itself. But it is just the strength of this public inclination towards order and labour which varies so greatly in different hives. How matters are likely to go can be readily ascertained by setting careful watch on the hive from the day the first swarm leaves. There are sure to be several queen-cells, some capped over and almost ready to hatch out, and others in various stages of development. All these cells are constantly and assiduously guarded by the worker-bees, because directly one of the queens is hatched, her first thought is to make a speedy end to all future rivalry by murdering her sisters. She comes from her cell evidently spoiling for a fight, and imbued to the core with that inveterate hatred of her kind which is the ruling passion of her existence.

That worker-bees and queen-bees should have an identical origin, and yet that the nature of the one is to live in perfect harmony, while the nature of the other is to be at perpetual war, is one of those mysterious things in bee-life which probably will never be explained. If the queen-bee of to-day can be really taken as an approximate type of the aboriginal female of her race, it is not difficult to understand that after her generation in force the communal life of the mother-stock would become an impossibility, and that with the mating-swarm its natural existence was brought to a close, much as we see it happen in wasp-life.