It is during the quiet nights, after the issue of a swarm, that the peculiar shrill voice of the queen is most frequently heard. As she strives with the guards that surround the cells of the other young queens as yet unliberated, she continually utters this quick piping cry, and is immediately answered by the smothered cries of the imprisoned ones, who are just as anxious as she for the fray. If the swarming-fever is not yet allayed in the hive, this war-cry is bandied to and fro unceasingly; and the general ferment deepens, until, the condition of things having seemingly grown intolerable, the young queen rushes out, followed by the greater number of the bees. In the case of after-swarms, the concensus of evidence is in favour of the belief that the queen is really the leader of the party, although here again no positive rule is observed.
It may happen, however, that the stock is sick of all the turbulence and unrest that have so long beset it, and that the general desire is to restore the status quo. Under these conditions the sounds from the hive may have a very different quality and meaning. The queen still sends forth her shrill challenge, but now her cry is immediately followed by a curious hissing sound from the bees. It is exactly as if they were shouting her down, compelling her to silence by their own uproar; and when the war-cry of the first liberated queen is thus met by a chorus of disapprobation, it seldom happens that the stock swarms again. In a few days the queen goes forth alone on her honeymooning adventures; and on her return she is allowed to indulge her penchant for sororicide to her heart’s content.
CHAPTER XII
THE COMB-BUILDERS
In the foregoing chapters an attempt has been made to show that the honey-bee lives and moves and has her being in a world which must be actuated by something better than mere instinct, in the common usage of the term. To the modern biologist—the earnest out-of-door student of life under all its manifestations—this may appear as a rather obvious and unnecessary gilding of gold, and the only question yet undecided may seem to be where in the scale of reason the honey-bee is to find her equitable place.
All bee-lovers must plead guilty to an inveterate partizanship, the writer frankly among their number. There is no laodiceanism in bee-craft; and, all the world over, it may be said that, where a few beehives have been got together, there is always to be found a red-hot enthusiast not far off. The word “freemasonry,” in the English tongue, has grown to be a synonym for the truest fraternity; but just as real, and almost as far-reaching, is the brotherhood among keepers of bees. No doubt, among themselves the tendency is rather to magnify the virtues and achievements of their charges: to be over-lavish of inference from too scanty or too isolated facts. And the proved impossibility of having anything to do with the honey-bee without being carried away sooner or later on a high wave of enthusiasm, makes any attempt at holding the balances truly between the zealous bee-lover and the interested but temperate-minded reader, a difficult and delicate task. Any writer on the honey-bee nowadays must be reckoned an ultra-specialist in an age of specialism; and here it is not easy to preserve the sense of proportion undimmed, especially for one admittedly speaking out of the ranks of beemanship, where all are aiders and abettors in ardour, impatient of any estimation falling short of high-water mark.
The story of the Comb-Builders, however, sets none of the usual pitfalls in the way of the over-enthusiastic penman. In its soberest incident and least important detail it is so wonderful, that exuberance of language is as powerless to exaggerate, as a niggardly tongue to minimise, its true and due effect. If the ordering of the bee-commonwealth—the intricate systems of sanitation, division of labour, treatment of the queen and worker-larva, and the like—is subject for marvel, and seems infallibly to denote the possession of high faculties, a much greater degree of acumen must be conceded to the worker-bee when we come to consider her as the designer and builder of honeycomb.
It is here that she shines in her most significant light. The complicated structures with which she fills the bee-city do not call for unwearying toil alone: they could never have been fashioned unless the combined arts of engineer, architect, and mathematician had been brought to bear on them. Nor are they merely simple constructive and mathematical problems which the honey-bee is called upon to face; nor, though difficult, unvarying, and so amenable to instinctive solution. In almost every comb built we see special and necessarily unforeseen difficulties met and triumphantly overcome. In the construction of the six-sided cell, with its base composed of three rhombs or diamonds, the bee has adopted a form which our greatest arithmeticians admit to be the best possible for her requirements, and she endeavours to keep to this form wherever practicable. But it constantly happens, in her work of comb-building, that local conditions interfere with her plans; and then she will make five-sided cells, or square cells, or triangular, or any other form, just as the need impels her. It is a facile, comfortably finite thing to put all this down to a mysterious essence called instinct, with which the organism of the bee has been divinely dosed, as men serve electricity to a Leyden jar. But it was not instinct that made Wren put the steel cable round the dome of St. Paul’s, nor instinct that lifted the crown-stones to the top of the Great Pyramids. These are works of a creature more highly equipped and instigated; yet their supremacy is all of a piece with the honey-comb, which is made of a material fragile, light as air, but which, by the art of the bee, becomes capable not only of supporting, but of suspending a weight thirty times as great as its own.
That the bee does not collect her building materials, but derives them from her own body, is a fact that has come to light only within the last hundred and fifty years or so, although several shrewd guesses at the truth are to be found in the works of the mediæval bee-masters. The wasp, who has much of the ingenuity of the honey-bee, but is doomed to exercise it in a far more humble direction, makes a six-sided cell; but her matter is collected from outside, and can only be put to comparatively simple uses, as it is incapable of bearing tensile strain. Beeswax alone, of all constructive materials in the world, seems to meet every requirement. It can be worked into plates as thin as the 1/180th part of an inch, which is the normal thickness of the cell-wall. It is indestructible to all the elements save heat. It can be rendered soft and easily workable, or allowed to harden, while still retaining its suppleness and life. It is a bad conductor of heat, and therefore conserves the heat of the hive. Vermin do not prey upon it: so far as is known there is only one creature that will eat it—a peculiar kind of moth-larva, against which, however, a strong stock can always hold its own. And then, as the raw materials for its production are secretions of the bee’s own body, the work of preparing it can be carried on when darkness or stress of weather have put an end, for the time being, to work out of doors.
The first labour undertaken by a swarm, directly it has gained possession of its new quarters, is the building of combs. The apparent revulsion of feeling which succeeds the excitement of swarming soon passes off, and the energies of the whole party are at once concentrated on furnishing and victualling the new hive. The older bees commence foraging, each bee as she goes forth hovering a moment with her head towards the hive, to fix its location and appearance in her memory. By far the greater portion, however, remain at home and unite in a dense cluster for wax-making. Time is everything in these first operations of the new colony. The queen, with whom egg-laying has probably been suspended for a day past, or even longer, is overburdened with fecundity, and must be supplied with thousands of brood-cells without delay. The foragers will be coming home laden with nectar and pollen, and will need instant storage-room. Wax must be made with all possible expedition, and the young bees crowd together in the roof of the hive, with their queen snug and warm in their midst.
No doubt one of the chief reasons why swarming bees unite themselves in the solid pendant mass of the cluster so soon after leaving the parent-hive, is to hasten this process of wax-formation. It has been proved that wax is most easily generated under the influence of great heat, and this is well secured in the heart of the cluster. By the time the scouts have decided on the new home, and the swarm must rise again on the wing, a great number of the bees will have their wax-pockets filled, and will be ready for the work of comb-making. When a swarm is hived, even if it be only a short time after its issue, the little white wax-scales can be seen protruding from the armour-joints of many of the bees, and these are often dropped and lost in the general confusion.