It is no wonder that the happy bee of the community, escaping all such trial, makes blithe murmur to itself over its luscious labor. Perhaps all artisans would sing as cheerfully, were their task as sweet; it can be no such severe duty to fill one's basket with the bountiful store at hand, when one has just banqueted on the very dew of the morning. There are a few secondary products of Nature on which words cannot be wasted. It is pleasant to recall the poetical charms of wine, its tints, its aromas, and its sparkles; yet, with all that fire and fragrance, it seems but poor, thin stuff, when poured out beside the heavy flow of honey with sunbeams dissolved in every plash. The Hungarian huntsman may praise his ropy Cotnar, fine ladies sip cordial Rosolio and Levantine sirups, the fancy warm over African Constantia; but every peasant has honey in his garden, and they buy it of him to enrich their best Muscats. The great globes of the grape on which the wind and weather have breathed a bloom, pulped with rain, and sweetened with sun, the dew-drops slipping down among them as they stir beneath the weight of some bird that springs from the stem into the sky,—these lend their beauty and innocence as a kind of chrism to cover the profanities of wine, which, before it can be used at all, undergoes a kind of decomposition; but the wild wine of the bramble-rose has no need of its youth in apology for its age. It is stainless honey still; the sweet earth-juices stole up the tiny ducts of the flower to secrete it; showers and odors, warmth and balm, distilled together into the nectary to give it wealth and savor; it yet preserves the essence of long summer days, of serene nights, of wandering winds, of mingled blossoms; it is the link between vegetable and animal productions; it has undergone the processes of a higher organization than that of the plant; it is, in fact, the bee himself, and not all the art of all the laboratories can reproduce it. Into all these other secondary products some stain of humanity enters; but little sinless sprites of greenwood and glen alone share the occult science of this with the blossoms. As light and heat are the generative forces of the world, honey seems to be their first result; it is lapped, indeed, in flowers, but it looks like candied sunshine. From the beginning, it has been regarded as a sacred substance; some have supposed it the earliest element of vegetation. The ancients made offering of it to the souls of the departed; they preserved their dead in its incorruptible medium; they sacrificed it to the gods. "With honey out of the rock should I have satisfied thee," said the Psalmist, as if earth had nothing more to give. Nor has it to our bee. Let him fill his honey-vesicle, he will regurgitate the deposit into a cell that he closes with a thin waxen pellicle, or into another already partially occupied by the farina of flowers, which he knows to be perishable, and therefore secludes from the air in the same fashion that the Romans used to seal their flasks of Falernian,—with a few drops of honey at the mouth. Give him a grain of pollen, a taste of stagnant water, a drop of honey, and kings could not enrich him. The honey is his food, in the stagnant water he finds salts requisite as remedies; but what the bee wants with the grain of pollen is still a doubtful matter among apiarists. He makes of it a confection for the brood, it is also an ingredient of the royal jelly, he eats it himself, and he elaborates it in scales of wax upon his body, say those who follow Huber; on the other hand, the brood receive no confection or food whatever, there is no such thing as royal jelly, the insect will die sooner than partake of pollen, and there is no wax elaborated in scales upon the body of any bee, say those who oppose Huber. But if the brood are not fed, one may ask, why does the wild bee, the tapestry, or the carder bee, take such pains, before closing the nest where her egg is hidden, to store there the little drop of honey? and what is it that occasions the greater consumption of honey during the brooding period than during any other portion of the year? It is really a pity, when Huber has given us so many interesting relations, that people must needs go prying into their truth. How is it possible that Nature could improve upon them? Kirby, indeed, accepts them all, and hands them down to us; subsequent encyclopedists have profited by his example; and Michelet, who between a true story and a picturesque one never hesitates a moment,—who tells us that the down on the butterfly's wing is a collection of exquisitely minute balloons, and that the silkworm files its way out of the cocoon with its eyes,—leading us to think, that, if his great history partake of the nature of his lesser works, it must be an assemblage of splendid errors,—M. Michelet out-Hubers Huber himself. Contrary to these, Mr. Huish, a British author, declares that a rod ought to be pickled for the man who dared impose such sheer inventions upon the credulity of a weak-minded public; and although he does not say it in so many words, he has evidently pictured to himself the consternation with which Huber's wife and servant must have looked at one another when he announced to them his intention of publishing a book of the fairy stories with which they had amused him, and suffered him to amuse his friend Bonnet. Huber has novelty, romance, and interest, upon his side; Huish has certainly a little logic. The latter's book upon the subject is, nevertheless, as quarrelsome an affair as ever was published; he seems to be as choleric and adust of temperament as the bees themselves; he contradicts every one who has dared to speak upon the matter, and, while insisting that they could by no possibility have seen what they pretend to have done, asserts opposing facts, which he could no more have seen than they.
There is a close classification in Huber's system, the results of which give us several ranks among bees,—those of the queen, the drone, the jelly-maker, the artists in wax, the nurse, the harvester, and a certain little useless black bee. Adversely to this, Mr. Huish, who would carry bee-craft back to a pre-Réaumurite period, reverts to the original observations, and declares there are but three sorts of bee in the hive,—queen, drone, and worker,—which obviously simplifies matters; while as for the little black bee, he regards it as existing nowhere but in the head of its discoverer, so that, if the worthy person had not the traditional maggot in his brain, he might at least be said to have a bee in his bonnet. The sociable caterpillars, we are told, work as each one pleases. John Hunter said that bees did, too; and here Mr. Huish is of the same opinion,—this or that worker scours the fields or fashions the cell according to the fancy that may overcome him. Him? That is exactly the question. Mademoiselle Jurine, following the anatomical researches of her father, promulgated the discovery that the common bee was a decided female, with its organs undeveloped. To counterbalance her statements, M. Epignes published a treatise in which he proved satisfactorily to himself that the common bee is a decided male. Mr. Huish insists that the common bee is a decided neuter. Discarding M. Epignes with a fillip, Mr. Huish stoutly argues, against Mademoiselle Jurine's theory, that the possession of organs destined to no use is an incident out of the course of Nature,—to which, even were the statement quite true, it might be added that the creation of a community of a thousand males and one female is equally out of the course of Nature. Mr. Huish insists, that, if these bees were all females, yet forbidden the functions of their sex, it would be an anomaly; he forgets that the existence of a neuter is already an anomaly. Allowing that Mr. Huish is here in the wrong, as seems probable, it involves a slight trouble of its own; for there would then seem to be need of but two kinds of eggs in the hive, whereas it is well established that three kinds are laid,—that of the male, the female, and the worker, or imperfect female. Huber, however, in such dilemma, adopting the previous hints of Schirach, at once seized upon Mademoiselle Jurine's discovery, and assured us, not only that from the egg of a worker a queen could at any time be produced, but enlightened us as to the manner of conducting the experiment. The queen is dead? It is lamentable, but nothing so easy as to make another. There is only to tear down some dozen cells, to set the youngest embryo afloat in royal jelly, and a queen appears, who, if not in the legitimate line, is capable of performing perfectly all the office of a sovereign. There is a moment of intense despair, great riot, and agitation; work is suspended; the temperature of the hive mounts many degrees. All at once the old art is remembered,—the administration of that delicious medicament, of so astonishingly affluent nature that it can make a queen out of a commoner, the enlargement of the narrow cradle to that ampler space which forbids the atrophy of a single fibre of the body. The preparations are made; and, with tranquillity restored, the people await the event. One day there comes a singular piping sound,—it is the cry of the royal babe,—the hive is filled with rejoicing,—there is no longer any interregnum of the purple,—the queen is born! Perhaps the queen-makers have been too much in earnest, and at nearly the same moment the inmates of two royal cells issue together. Then is the time to try one's mettle,—no shrinking, no bias, nothing but pure patriotism. Let a ring be formed, and she who proves herself victor is worthy of homage. Is one of the two a coward? The impartial circle bring her back to the encounter, bite her, tease her, tumble her, worry her, tell her plainly that life is possible to her on no terms but those of conquest. At length the matter decides itself; the brilliant and victorious Amazon bends her long, slender body, and with her royal poniard pierces the abject pretender through and through. Then these satisfied subjects surround her, load her with endearments, cleanse her, brush her, lick her, offer her honey on the end of their proboscides, and, if there are yet remaining other royal apartments whose tenants give notice of timely appearance, they conduct her on an Elizabethan progress, in which, filled with instinctive dismay, she pauses at every cell, and stabs her young rivals to death with her sting. As the story runs, there are still other conditions to be fulfilled by the aspiring princess,—she must give her people the assurance of a populous empire. Should she fail in this, they have recourse to their old man[oe]uvres, becoming manifestly insubordinate and unruly. If, however, they at any time wax unbearable in their insolence, the young monarch has it in her power, by assuming a singular attitude, standing erect at a little distance, her wings crossed upon her back and slightly fluttering, while she utters a shrill, slender sound, to strike them dumb, so that they hang their heads for shame.
All this pretty story the later apiarists deem a tissue of fiction and fallacy. If, when a hive is deprived of its queen, there happen to be a royal egg remaining in it, they say, it will shortly produce a queen, as, if it had been a common egg, it would have produced a common bee. They insist that the organism of the creature to be produced is inherent in the egg, and do not believe it in the power of a bee to alter a law of Nature; they deny the statements of Schirach, Huber, Dunbar, Rennie, and others to this effect,—scout the idea of the existence of such a thing as royal jelly at all, with the supposed aristocracy of its compounders,—share with Huber the amazement he says he felt, when, in a time of disturbance, he distinctly heard a queen address her bees in the French language, saying, "Je suis ici, je suis ici"—entirely repudiate the royal duels, which the editor of the "Naturalist's Library" himself, an advocate as he is of the Huberian principles, confesses he has never, in all his experience, been able to witness,—and go to the extreme of declaring, that, far from being the truculent and jealous tyrant described, the queen is the most timid of all creatures, flying, at the first intimation of danger, into the depths of the hive, and never using her sting under any circumstances through the whole course of her life, while, should you get one in your hand, you may offer her indignities with impunity; she knows her value to her people, and that, should she sting and be unable to withdraw her barbed weapon, the effort would disembowel her, and prove her own death and the ruin of her kingdom. The royal larvæ, Huber tells us, in spinning their cocoons, leave the lower rings of the body unprotected by the gossamer envelope, that thus,—and it is certainly considerate on their part,—the head being too well shielded by the hard nature of its substances, and the cocoon endangering the safety of her sting by its entangling flimsy threads, their queenly assailant may destroy them without detriment to herself, by stinging that portion left exposed. On the contrary, we are informed by his refuters, that, even were the body destitute of this covering, which is not the case, it would present a horny, scaly surface, from which there would be infinitely greater difficulty in extracting the sting than from the silken meshes of any cocoon,—and that, as no sting could pierce the waxen wall of the cell, and as the royal cell is vertical, and the nymph lies with its head towards the orifice of it, unless the queen, with her sting of the eighth of an inch in length, had the power of darting it through the orifice to the distance of three fourths of an inch, the act would be otherwise an impossibility,—and that, to finish the affair, these infant princesses are destroyed by the bees themselves, who, finding them unnecessary for further swarming, tear them from their cells, and despatch them, not by dart or venom, but, when they are in a sufficiently advanced stage, by an attack of the teeth at the root of the wings, in the same way that they despatch the drone, disabling and dragging them out of the hive, after they have become supernumeraries, where they drop to the ground, and, powerless to fly and escape, perish with cold, or become the prey of bird, mouse, and reptile. It is possible that none of the various tribes of all the tiny arm-bearing people make use of the coup de grâce in their power, except as a last resort. Still, when the bees find it necessary, they use it with Spartan cunning. Bruin can testify to that in his sensitive muzzle; and thus, when he takes a fancy to their conserve of blossoms, he carries off the hive in his hug, and plunges it into the nearest brook or pool till the bees are drowned, and all their riches made his undisturbed possession. The bee that is not irascible betrays a dismal home and a miserable mother; he has nothing worth fighting for. But far from him be malice; unmolested, he does not molest. For one who has lived in an old mansion, with bats' nests under the eaves and wasps' nests everywhere, waking in autumn mornings to count the customary inhabitants of the latter clustered on the cornices by threescores, while observing that they always made themselves sufficiently at home, not only to claim a place at table, but to walk across the cloth and help themselves, pausing sometimes midway to flirt out the purple enamel of a wing for admiration, and never giving offence to one of the house,—for one who has seen this fierce and fell fury so prettily and quietly behaved, it is pardonable to claim an equal amount of moderation for the sweeter and purer nature of the little honey-maker, who has learned his gentler manners of the flowers themselves. There are occasions, moreover, when the bees positively forget they have a sting at all, as when, in swarming, they are so entirely absorbed that they may be lifted in handfuls. M. Lombard states the circumstance of a child's being cured of her fear of the sting by an experience of this season. "A swarm having left a hive, I observed the queen alight by herself, at a little distance from the apiary. I immediately called my little friend, that I might show her this important personage. She was anxious to have a nearer view of Her Majesty; and therefore, having first caused her to draw on her gloves, I gave the queen into her hand. Scarcely had I done so, when we were surrounded by all the bees of the swarm. In this emergency, I encouraged the trembling girl to be steady, and to fear nothing, remaining myself close by her, and covering her head and shoulders with a thin handkerchief. I then made her stretch out the hand that held the queen, and the bees instantly alighted on it, and hung from her fingers as from the branch of a tree. The little girl, experiencing no injury, was delighted above measure at the novel sight, and so entirely freed from all fear that she bade me uncover her face. The spectators were charmed at the interesting spectacle. I at length brought a hive, and, shaking the swarm from the child's hand, it was lodged in safety without inflicting a single sting."
But however greatly opinions may vary in this branch of natural history on one or another topic, the principal dispute is concerning the relations that may subsist between the queen and the drones. Huber had a complicated arrangement in reference to this, which his admirers accepted enthusiastically, while Latreille and other apiarists reject it as a cluster of prurient fancies. The opinion of Huish upon the subject, which would seem to have more probability to support it than others have, is that the queen commences to lay immediately on being established, and that the eggs being in their separate cells, it is the office of the drone to make them fruitful, after the custom of certain fish and of frogs.
"When the population of the hive has been so increased by the opening of the brood-cells that accommodation has become insufficient, and the heat so unendurable that every wing droops wet and flaccid with perspiration, as grand an emigration as those of the early Northern tribes is ordered, scouts are sent out to select the future place of abode, and in some propitious moment of perfect sunshine, honey-pouches full and nothing to delay, the great exodus takes place with a noise as if the whole hive were attacked by vertigo; and Homer himself could find nothing to which to compare his multitudinous Greeks thronging from their ships fitter than these nations of close-swarming bees. That the young queen should lead the departing swarm seems the natural occurrence, being desirous of fulfilling her own destiny and of hastening from a hive hostile to all but one mistress whom they already know and love. Huber, however, will have it that it is the old queen, who, outraged and indignant at her treatment when a rival is allowed to live, sounds the alarm and sallies forth with her adherents. In support of this Mr. Duncan mentions having deprived an old queen of one of her antennæ, and noticing her thereafter at the head of a swarm, although Huber previously makes it known that any bee deprived of one of its antennæ is rendered useless. And in opposition to it may be given the circumstance quoted by Mr. Huish, in which the German apiarian Scopoli asserts, that, having clipped the wings of a queen, he found her still in his hive after an interval of many months, during which two excellent swarms had been thrown, and rather plumes himself on the triumphant fact, as if by any possibility she could have gotten away. A hive will throw off from one to four swarms in a season, but the last two are generally worthless, and should be deprived of their queens and returned to the parent stock. We have an old adage to this purpose,—
A swarm in May
Is worth a load of hay,
A swarm in June
Is worth a silver spoon,
But the swarm of July
Isn't worth a fly,"—
and any one may verify it who chooses to investigate the condition of such swarms at the conclusion of the harvest, when it will be seen that those which founded their colony at so late an hour have not collected sufficient honey even for their winter provision, and must be fed in order to be saved till spring.
They have dainty appetites, these little people. They will work away with their forceps at a bit of sweetmeat, but they can absorb only liquids through their proboscides. Being in a state of civilization, their food must be administered in a civilized way: it must be boiled for them. They fancy stimulants; and sugar dissolved in ale, old brown October, or, better still, made into a rich sirup with Port wine, they find very delectable. Those authors who regard pollen as a part of their subsistence deem that it is because they require nitrogenized substances; and in order to prove that it is used as food, they remark that the bees continue to harvest it so long as a single flower blows, and that entirely after the formation of the cells has ceased. This, however, may be owing simply to the instinct which prompted them in the first place to bring it home, as instinct is generally in all creatures stronger than reason and overloaded; and that it cannot be any portion of the food of bees seems evident from the fact that whole hives are known to have perished by hunger while still abundantly supplied with bee-bread, as the pollen is often called. It is more probable that pollen is really the chief constituent of wax, although Huber submits that honey has that honor; but that this wax is produced in the manner that Huber states is extremely doubtful. It is his opinion that the wax-workers, having first gorged themselves with honey, suspend themselves in festoons from the flowers, where they remain for twenty-four hours,—which in a chilly spring night would break many a link of the chain,—after which, one detaches herself from the festoon, enters the hive, and takes up her situation, with her forceps detaches a scale of wax from her side where it has recently exuded, works it with her tongue, and fashions it to the required consistency, succeeded in turn by others, artisan and apprentice. But as honey is the normal and established food of bees, it would follow that these scales must be in a state of perpetual exudation, and thus before long the hive would become filled with them, unless bees have a control of their bodily secretions enjoyed by no other order of beings. Anatomical dissection has found pollen only in the second stomach of the bee, of which the mouth is the sole and single opening; it is therefore presumed, that, being taken in a crude condition, and having undergone its due elaboration there, it is disgorged again and becomes the wax of the cells. This was the opinion of Réaumur; and for additional proof, it is stated, that, though the workers are seen to collect large quantities of farina during the season in which the cells are being made, no particle of crude farina is meanwhile to be found in a single cell, the whole of it being used in their composition. All this, however, will long remain in uncertainty; for, till some one is born with eyes of his own, ready to devote his lifelong labor to such observations, and perhaps in the end be stung to death for his pains,—since there are rebellions even in heaven, we learn,—there will be general willingness to accept the most piquant little statements regarding this most peculiar little people.
Wax itself is a substance that has no similitude to any other known. It is now thought, that, as there are three orders of bee, so there are three substances merely in the hive,—honey, farina, and wax. Pliny enumerates three others,—commosis, pissoceros, and propolis. Of these many moderns still retain the last, calling it a resinous matter collected from alders and willows, and used for the more secure foundation of the comb. But upon subjecting a lump of propolis to the boiling process by which wax is purified, it turns out simple wax of nearly its former weight; and it is accordingly presumed to be only wax in a much more crude stage of elaboration. Dr. Bevan, in experimenting with his hives, says that he melted wax and spread it upon a certain place, and, while fluid, attached a slight guide-comb to it, which the bees immediately adopted, suspending their whole comb thereby; from which it is evident, that, wax being strong enough itself for a foundation, propolis is unnecessary, and Nature is not apt to afford superfluities in her economy of construction.
The beautiful geometry of the cells is, after all, the marvel of the whole. Koenig demonstrated, that, in the problem of space and material, the bee had at once arrived at the solution which he himself reached only after infinitesimal calculations; and it furnishes fresh proof of the great mathematical relations of the universe, when even instinct is found to take on the accuracy and method of crystals. This honey-comb, by the way, is a favorite figure in Nature. If one examines microscopically the beautiful and brilliant petal of a gladiolus, it will offer this cellular structure in loose and irregular outlines; but under the same lens, the eye of a dragon-fly, which displays by daylight a jewel-like transparency, will be seen a strict crowd of glittering hexagons, with every alveole so closely arranged and so symmetrically shaped as to afford instant testimony to the superiority of the animal organization. It is by no means the habit of all bees, however, to dispose their affairs with such precision, though many other methods may have an equal grace. Don Felix d'Azara tells us of South American bees which deposit their honey in small waxen cups, and are known as Angelitos, because never using the sting; while the little black stingless bee of Guadaloupe, which inhabits the clefts of hollow rocks by the seaside, stores its honey in cells the size of a pigeon's egg, each sacklet being filled only so far as it will hold without tearing from its fellow, and a pretty piece of color being effected by the amber honey in its receptacles of dark violet-colored wax which never blanches, as the whole hangs together like a great cluster of grapes. This is a species of bee not greatly differing from that which makes the honey of Estabentum, that Clavigero says is taken every two months and is the finest in the world. The Mexicans are reported to attend with care to the culture of these bees, not so much for their rich honey as for the wax, of which large quantities are used in their common church ceremonials.