As a typical instance of a sluggard and idler, the drone-bee has enjoyed a vogue in the preparatory-school books for ages past. But, whatever his primæval equipment for usefulness may have been, it is evident now that he could not labour if he would. Physically, in all points but that of muscle, as well as mentally, he has become degraded to the inferior of the worker-bee in every way. He is destitute of all those special contrivances with which she is so amply furnished. He has no baskets for pollen-carrying, nor any of the ingenious brushes and combs which she uses to scrape the pollen from herself and others. He has neither wax-generating organs, nor leg-pincers to deal with wax. His tongue is too short for honey-getting. His brain is much smaller than even that of the feeble-minded queen. The intricate gland-systems, which play so important a role in the daily life of the worker, are either completely atrophied in the drone or exist only in an elementary state. While it has been the communal will of the hive that the worker-bee should develop an amazing proficiency of mind and body, the same forces have been steadily at work to degrade the male-bee into a creature of dependence, gradually training out of him all initiative and idea, except in the one direction. Just as in the case of the queen and the worker, drone and worker-bee seem hardly to belong to the same race.
And yet, for all his frank incapabilities and lack of ideals, the drone offers, in one respect, a refreshing contrast to his sour, stern, duty-worshipping sister. He is a life-long, incorrigible optimist. He fiddles gaily while the city burns. All his misery and mourning would not serve to quench a single spark of it; so he eats, drinks, and is merry, with the intuition of all drones that Nemesis waits on the morrow with something disagreeable. It is impossible to study his ways for long without recognising the spirit of rude jollity and horse-play that thoroughly pervades all he does. In and out of the hive he blusters, cannoning roughly against all he meets, and raising his burly, bullying song in the air as a sort of protest against all this anxious industry going on about him. Once gone from the neighbourhood of the hive, he seems to keep incessantly on the wing until hunger prompts him home again. For no one has ever seen a drone-bee among the insects that haunt the flowers, nor ever seen him basking on a sunlit wall or tree-trunk, after the kind of almost every other winged atom in the universe.
He comes back to the hive with the same noisy, careless fanfaronade, and is received by the workers with the same sullen indifference. They give him his fill of bee-milk, linking tongues with him as he sits up like an overgrown baby, voracious, clamouring to be fed. They suffer him to swill at the honey-stores unchecked, but plainly regard him with contumely. He is a terrible expense to the State, yet a necessary one. Silently they go about their uncongenial business of nourishing him—silently, and with an ominous patience. They grudge him every drop, and, all the more, urge him to his excesses. It is not for long. The day of reckoning is near at hand. Already the poppies glow scarlet on the hill—the poppies that mark the turning-point of the summer; and after them the long decline, with its ever-diminishing sun-glow; each day with a scantier meed of blossom, until the path runs again into the dreary levels, the sober greys and russets, of winter death.
Now the worker-bee is to show a grizzly seam in her nature, matching ill with the fine hues and qualities of mind for which she is so justly famed. And that she is not all lovable, all admirable, accounts for the exceeding love of her that moves the hearts of men who know her through and through. The story of the massacre of the drones has hardly a parallel for sheer relentless ferocity—unrecking abandonment to a vengeance long withheld for expediency’s sake. There come the first chill nights of mid-July, and the honey-flow is suddenly at an end. The clover and sainfoin have already fallen to the sickle. Nothing but the bravest warmth and exuberance of the summer could now withstand the drain of the myriad honey-makers, and a few hours’ cold dams up at once the attenuated stream. The time of prosperity is over. There will be no more abundance of honey. It remains for the genius of hive-economy to prove how much of what has been gathered can be preserved for future needs.
The first sign of the débâcle is the throwing out at the hive entrance of certain pale, gruesome objects—the corpses of immature drones, not dead from mischance, but ruthlessly torn from their cells. This may go on intermittently for many days, and while the fell work is proceeding the living drones seem to take no warning. They keep up their merry round; the unending feast riots forward; daily the bee-garden is filled with their careless, overweening song. And then at last the signal for the slaughter is given. Within each hive a curious sobbing outcry begins—a cry that is nothing but sheer terror put into sound. The drones no longer lie in easy ranks between the combs, placidly sleeping off one debauch and dreaming of another. They are all awake now, and fleeing abjectly for their lives through the narrow ways of the bee-city, the workers in hot pursuit.
The deep, vibrant, horror-laden note increases hour by hour. As each executioner overtakes her victim, she grips him by the base of the wing; and, helped by others all alike infuriate at the work, she half drags, half pushes him through the throng, until she has him in the light of day, and tumbles with him to the ground; he for ever fighting and struggling, and uttering that frenzied note of fear; she savagely gnawing at the wing until it is disabled, and he can never more return to the hive. Many of the strongest drones escape from their persecutors for the time being, and fly away unhurt. But it is only for a few hours. Hunger is sure to bring them back to the hive, when the waiting guards fall upon them, and maim or drive them off once more. It is specially to be marked that the bees never sting the drones at this great annual feast of carnage. There is that much method in the madness which has seized upon them; for, in the rough-and-tumble of such a conflict, stings would be plucked out by the roots, and thus valuable lives would go down with the worthless. The sole object seems to be to rid the hives as effectively as possible of the presence of the drones; and the disablement of one wing appears to be all that is necessary, and therefore all for which the deft assassin strives.
With some bee-races the massacre of the drones is carried through in an incredibly short space of time; with others the agony of the thing is drawn out for days together. The wretched sires of the hive are caught between two evils, each as fatal as the other. If they fly off to the fields, starvation and the night-chills will swiftly bring about their end. If they return to the hive, a still speedier death awaits them. Night and day, at this time, the guard-bees are doubled and re-doubled at the city-gates; and there is little chance of the wiliest drone outwitting them. But he usually takes the home-hazard; and sooner or later comes blundering in, receiving with open arms, as it were, his share of the knife, as Huddlestone faced the Carbonari.
All this is the common way with the bee-republic, when the season goes as it should; and the hive is in possession of a mother-bee—young, strong, and of proved fecundity. But there are times when the drones—for all their great expense and drain on the wealth of the colony—are suffered to live on until the late autumn, or even to remain unmolested throughout the winter and following spring. If the bee-master sees drones about a hive, when other colonies have long ago made a good riddance of them, he well knows what ails the stock. Its queen is old and failing; and these astute amazons have given reprieve to their male-kind until a new mother-bee can be raised and properly mated. It is a case of mercy to the drones tempered with so much justice to themselves that the original virtue is largely discounted.
And where the drones are carried through the winter, it is ever a sign that the hive is not only without a queen, but never will contrive one, of their own race. Yet they know that, in the preservation of the drones, they have at least one indispensable element for their salvation, and—who shall gainsay it of the sovereign honey-bee?—perhaps they rely on the bee-master to guess their plight, and furnish them with another queen, in time to save his property from extinction.