The Lore of the Honey-Bee

by Tickner Edwardes

This remorseless smelting-down of life into the set moulds of principle, without mercy and without reproach, has a cumulative effect on the mind of the observer; and sooner or later, though he will early lose his fear of her sting, he will develop a very real, but vague, awe of the honey-bee in another way.

Just as Moses Rusden, the King’s bee-master, held up the life of the hive as Nature’s evidence of the Divine will in earthly monarchy, so the latter-day student is often constrained to ask himself whether the bee-commonwealth does not point an authoritative moral in another way. Here is a State—only a mimic one, but still not a negligible example—where several of the most fiercely-debated questions of modern human life are seen in long adopted and perfected working-order, and seen in their fullness of result. Any attempt at a serious comparison between men and women, and the drone and worker-bee, would justly lay the writer open to the charge of grotesque trifling; but there is more than a fanciful analogy between the principles on which all civilisations must be based, whether they are insect or human. It cannot be denied that the communal life of the honey-bee is a high civilisation; that it has grown to be what it is to-day through ages of necessity; that the one sex has the other under a complete and terrible subjection, for which, and for the privilege of all power, the dominant sex has paid a terrible price.

The worker-bee to-day is an over-intellectual, neurotic, morbidly dutiful creature, while the drone is admittedly nothing but a stupid, happy, sensual lout. If the extreme difference between the sexes in bee-life had been aboriginal, the relations of drone and worker, as we see them in the hives to-day, would be meet and reasonable enough; but there seems to be clear evidence that, far back in the life of the race, the female bee was not so hopelessly superior to her mate. The queen-bee, in all likelihood, fairly represents the mother-bee as she was before the cooling crust of the earth made some sort of protected habitation necessary, which led first to close clustering for mutual warmth, and then gradually developed the complicated hive-life of to-day. But evolution will hardly account for all that we see: revolution must have had its part in the production of the modern self-unsexed worker. It has been seen that there is no physiological reason why each worker in the hive should not have grown into the fertile mother of thousands. The workers are not a stunted, specialised race, slowly evolved by time and necessity, and procreating their own stunted kind; but each worker is deliberately manufactured to a set pattern by the authorities in the hive, obedient to the call of the State. And when did the female bees begin this tampering with the springs of life, this improving upon Creation, which was the first vital step, failing which the present bee-commonwealth had been impossible? It looks very like a superb act of generalship in the great primæval war of sex—a brilliant piece of strategy that gave victory at a blow, and rendered the after-steps in the scheme of conquest a matter of logical sequence.

The whole question of the artificial production of the worker-bee is surrounded with difficulties; and it seems possible, on our present level of knowledge, to do little more than state the facts, and there leave them. The supremacy of the females in hive-life appears to have dated from the time that the vast majority deprived themselves, or were deprived by their immediate ancestors, of their share in procreation, and the ovipositor discovered itself as a weapon of offence and defence. Before the worker-bees existed as an armed force, there is no reason to suppose that the female bee had a great physical advantage over the drone. The queen-bee’s propensity to thrust her ovipositor into the spiracles of her rival, and so effectually to despatch her, as well as her inveterate hatred of her kind, may both be late developments, due to the isolated, artificial life she now leads. While the worker is ever ready with her sting, the queen uses it so rarely that many old experienced bee-keepers of the present time deny her altogether the power of stinging. A much more natural tendency with her is to bite; and when it comes to the use of the sharp, strong, sidelong jaws, the drone has a more redoubtable equipment than any, although he has apparently lost the will and sense to use it.

Whatever the drone may have been in far-off ages, the worker-bees have him now well under the iron heel of matriarchal expediency; and they see to it that he shall be fit only for the one indispensable office, although in that regard they exhaust every ingenuity to make him all that his kind should be. It is plain they would do without him altogether if that were possible. As it is, for nine months in the year there are no drones at all, and then only a few hundreds are raised in each hive—the bare minimum that will ensure the successful mating of the young queens when the summer sunshine calls them to their wooing. It might be supposed that where there are comparatively so few queens to be fertilised—only two or three at most from each hive, and these only once in a lifetime—that even those drones which are now tolerated are in excess of the number required. But a cardinal principle in bee-life is that the young queens shall choose their mates from another tribe, and so ensure a continual influx of new blood to the colony. This can only be effected out-of-doors, and as far as possible from the parent hive. The strongest impulse, therefore, of the virgin-queen, when she goes off on her mating-flight, is to get away quickly from her home surroundings. She flies straight off at tremendous speed, and thus has every chance of getting unperceived into new country, and so into the reconnoitring ground of strange drones.

Another reason for her extended flight and its remarkable pace is that only the strongest and swiftest drone of all the pursuing multitude is likely to overtake her, and this again makes for the betterment of the race. Perhaps there is no parallel instance in nature where the selection of the fittest individuals to continue a species is so carefully provided for, and no doubt this accounts for the high place of the honey-bee in the scale of created things. But this scheme involves enormous risk to the young queen. A hundred dangers lurk on her path. She is a tempting morsel for every bird that throngs the air of the June morning. Her untried wings may fail her. Even if she gets back safely to the bee-garden, she may enter the wrong hive, to her instant destruction. But she must take her chance of all risks; and the only thing to do is to render her absence from home as brief as may be, and her fertilisation as sure, by making the wandering drone-population large enough to cover all probable ranges of flight.

From the very first the drone is nurtured in a different way from the worker-bee. The egg is laid in a wider and deeper cell; and during its first three days of life the drone-larva is fed with bee-milk, probably of a special kind and certainly of more generous quantity. After the third day this chyle-food is reduced, as is the case with the worker-grub; but while the worker is then given only honey, it is certain that the drone-larva receives both honey and pollen, and that for a full day longer. In all, it takes about twenty-four or twenty-five days to produce the perfect drone-bee, as against an average twenty-one days for the worker. The queen-bee, as has been already seen, is developed in much less time than either, little more than a fortnight elapsing between the time the egg is laid and the time she is ready to gnaw her way out of the cell.

After the drone is hatched, it will be another two weeks or so before he makes his first venture in the open air. All this time he has the free run of the larder, and steadily gorges himself on honey when he is not sleeping off the effects of his surfeit in some snug, out-of-the-way corner of the hive. But honey is not his only, or even his principal, food. Throughout his whole life he is constantly fed by the house-bees with the rich chyle-food given to him as a larva, and it has been proved that if this is withheld from him for the space of three days he will die of starvation, even in the midst of abundant honey. Thus the worker-bees have him completely in their power.

The first flight of the drones is a stirring event in the bee-garden. The common sound of the hives goes on practically the whole year through. Every sunny midday, when the temperature mounts to 45° or 50°, will see each hive the centre of a little galaxy of singers: it is only the volume of the music that varies with the waxing or waning days. But with the coming of the drones the whole symphony of the bee-garden abruptly changes. They never move from their snug indoor quarters until the day is wearing on towards noon, and then only in the brightest weather. Blundering aggressively through the crowd of busy foragers, they rise heavily on the wing, and soon the ordinary note of the garden is drowned in the new uproar. They seem to come almost simultaneously from all hives at once. For a minute or two the rich, hoarse melody holds the air; and then, almost as suddenly, it dies away, as these roystering ne’er-do-wells troop off over hill and dale, each to his favourite hunting-ground.

There is great divergence of opinion as to the limits of flight of the drone, but probably he goes farther and faster than any have yet credited. His magnificent stretch and strength of wing mark him for a flier. He is all brute force and lusty energy; and it would be strange if, with but one thing to do in life—to gad about in search of amorous adventure—he could not do it to a purpose. If a hive of bees be removed to a distance in the height of the season, some of both workers and drones are sure to find their way back to the old spot. This has constantly taken place when hives have been carried no farther than two miles. But in one case, when the distance was more than twice as much, no workers were seen round the old hive-station, yet a little company of drones was winging aimlessly about the tenantless stool, and there can be little doubt that these belonged to the removed colony. It is not suggested that they deliberately travelled all these miles. The chances are that, in their daily flight, they got so far away from the new station that they came within the zone of old landmarks, and thus naturally went on by the long-accustomed ways.