Insect Stories

by Vernon L. Kellogg

How quiet everything was inside. And how lessened the number of bees. Fully one-third of the community must have gone out. We set to work looking carefully at all the remaining bees. It was only a minute or two before Mary clapped her hands and cried, "She's here!" "She" was Fuzzy, of course. And we were both very glad that Fuzzy had not deserted the glass house—and us.

Some one came in and said that a "lot of your bees are out here hanging on to a bush." But we had seen "swarms" before, and were much more interested in finding out what the bees do inside after a swarm has gone off than in watching the swarm outside. We knew that "scouts" would fly away soon from the great hanging bunch or swarm to look for a suitable new home; a hollow tree, a deserted hive, a box in hedge corner, any place protected and dark, and when they had found one, they would come back, and soon the whole swarm would fly off to the new house. Once one of our swarms started down a chimney of a neighbor's house, and immensely surprised the good people by coming out, with a great buzzing, into the fireplace! And another swarm, not finding a suitable indoors place, simply began to build new combs hanging down from the branch of a cypress-tree in the Arboretum, and really made an outdoor home there, carrying on all the work of a bee-community for months. But usually a bee-swarm gets found by some bee-keeper and put into an empty hive. And that is what happened to our deserters.

After Mary had found Fuzzy, who seemed to have lost considerable hair and to have got pretty well rubbed in the grand melée, she continued to peer carefully through the glass side of the hive. And I looked carefully too. Of course we wanted to find out about the queens. Was there any queen left in our hive? We knew there must be a queen with the swarm; bees don't go off without a queen. So if the old and new queen had fought and one had been killed, or if the workers had "balled" the new queen when she came out, there could be no queen left in the hive. Of course this would not be very serious. For there were many eggs and also many just-hatched bee-grubs in the brood-combs, and the workers could easily make a new queen. But this wasn't necessary, for we soon found a graceful, slender-bodied bee, but so fresh and brightly colored and clean that we knew her to be the new queen and not the old.

Things were perfectly normal and quiet. Some foragers were coming and going; house-cleaners were busily at work on the floor of the house, and nurses were moving about over the brood-cells. Not a trace of the wild frenzy of the forenoon. What a puzzling thing it is to see all the signs of tremendous mental excitement in other animals and yet not to be able to understand in the least their real condition! They may seem to do things for reasons and impulses that lead us to do things, but we can't be at all sure that their mental or nervous processes, their impulses and stimuli, are those which control us. We can't possibly put ourselves in their places. For we are made differently. And therefore it is plainly foolish to try to interpret the behavior of the lower animals on a basis of our understanding of our own behavior. Insects may see colors we cannot see; may hear sounds we cannot hear; smell odors too delicate for us to smell. In fact, from our observations and experiments, we are sure they do all these things. The world to them, then, is different from the world to us. And their behavior is based on their appreciation by their senses in their own way of this different world.

What determines which queen shall leave the hive with the swarm? What determines which five thousand out of fifteen thousand worker bees, all apparently similarly stimulated and excited, shall swarm out, and which ten thousand shall stay in? These are questions too hard for us to answer. We may take refuge in Maeterlinck's poetical conception of the "spirit of the hive." Let us say that the "spirit of the hive" decides these things. As well as what workers shall forage and what ones clean house; what bees shall ventilate and what make wax and build comb. Which is simply to say that we don't know what decides all these things.

The reduction in numbers of the inmates of Fuzzy's house made it much easier to follow closely the behavior of any one bee, or any special group of bees doing some one thing. And both Mary and I had long wanted to see as clearly as possible just what goes on when the bees are making wax and building comb. We had often examined, on the bodies of dead bees, the four pairs of five-sided wax-plates on the under side of the hind body. We knew that the wax comes out of skin-glands under these plates as a liquid, and oozes through the pores of the plates, spreading out and hardening in thin sheets on the outside of the plates. To produce the wax certain workers eat a large amount of honey, and then mass together in a curtain or festoon hanging down from the ceiling of the hive or frame. Here they increase the temperature of their bodies by some strong internal exertion; and after several hours or sometimes two or three days, the fine glistening wax-sheets appear on the wax-plates. These sheets get larger and larger until they project beyond the edges of the body, when they either fall off or are plucked off by other workers.

It was only two or three days after the excitement of the swarming out that Mary and I saw one of these curtains or hanging festoons of bees making wax, and you may be sure we tried to watch it closely. The bees hung to each other by their legs and kept quite still. The curtain hung down fully six inches from the ceiling of the house, and the first or upper row of bees had therefore to sustain the hanging weight of all those below. And there were certainly several hundred bees in the curtain. The wax-scales began to appear on the second day. And many of them fell off and down to the floor of the house. Some of the scales were plucked off by other workers and carried in their mouths to where a new comb had been started before the swarming, and either used by themselves to help in the comb-building or given to comb-builders already at work. Some of the scales were plucked off by the wax-making workers themselves, who then left the curtain and carried the wax-scales to the seat of the comb-building operations. Various other workers picked up from the floor the fallen scales and carried them to the comb-builders. These building bees would chew up pieces of wax in their mouths, mixing it with saliva, and then would press and mould it with their little trowel-like jaws against the comb, so as to build up steadily the familiar six-sided cells.

Each layer of comb is composed of a double tier or layer of these cells, a common partition or base serving as bottom of each tier. The cells to be used for brood are of two sizes, smaller ones for workers to be reared in, and larger ones for the drones. Sometimes the queen lays drone eggs in worker cells and then the cells have to be built up higher when the drone-grub gets too large for its cell. Sometimes, too, the worker bees lay eggs—this happens often in a hive bereft by some accident of its queen—but these eggs can only hatch into drones. Occasionally the workers make a mistake and build a queen cell around a drone egg. This happened once in our hive when there were no queen-laid eggs in the brood-cells, and some workers had laid eggs. The workers tried to make a new queen out of one of these eggs, but of course only a worthless drone came out of the queen cell. In building comb and cells for storing honey, new wax is almost exclusively used, but for brood-comb old wax and wax mixed with pollen may be used. Any comb or part of a comb not needed may be torn down and the wax used to build new comb or to cap cells with.

I have said that the nearest neighbors of Fuzzy's family are a lot of black German bees, housed in a larger house than Fuzzy's, but one also with glass sides so that we can see what goes on inside. The door of the house opens through the same large window as that of Fuzzy's house, but the foragers coming back from their long trips rarely make a mistake in the doors, the Germans coming to their door and the Italians to theirs. The German community is much the larger, there being probably thirty or forty thousand workers in it, although of course only one queen, and only a few hundred drones. Sometimes the foragers, both Germans and Italians, make the mistake of coming to the wrong window of the room in which their houses are. There are five large windows all alike in the west wall of this room, and often we find our bees bumping against the other windows, especially the ones just next to the right one. They can't, of course, see in through these windows because the room is much darker than outside, and so all that the home-coming bees can see as they approach the building is a row of similar windows separated from each other by similar spaces of buffy stone. And keen as our bees are in finding their way straight to their hives from distant flower-fields, this repetition of similar windows seems to confuse some of them.