The Courtship of Animals

by W. P. Pycraft

One cannot suppose that the queen in coming to a drone cell deliberately withholds the male germ as the egg passes down her oviduct; some inhibitory factor preventing the release of the sperm-cell must be brought into play which as yet we have not discovered. This production of males from unfertilized eggs, or “parthenogenesis” as it is called, is a common feature among the hymenoptera, and some other groups of insects, and it occurs also among other lowly creatures to be described later.

Having regard to the importance of the workers, a brief summary of their life-history must be given. These, it has already been indicated, are all, at any rate till three days old, potential queens. Their development into, or degradation to, the lower grade is determined, apparently, solely by the quality of the food, for the fact that queens are reared only in specially constructed cells of large size with walls of pollen instead of wax is explained by the larger size of the queen and the need for a more porous, air-permeated cell-wall on account of the longer time which must be spent in confinement. The worker is certainly the most “intellectual” member of the hive, but this superiority has been gained at a great price. Emerging from the chrysalis skin at about three weeks from the time that the egg from which she emerged was laid, she begins forthwith to gnaw her way through the mass of wax and pollen which forms the door of her prison. Rather, she eats her way through, for the material removed is swallowed as it is detached, thus the young bee, as Mr. Tickner Edwardes remarks, is caused to effect her own release by the promptings of her appetite. Hunger-strikes in the bee community are unknown. Speedily the youngster steps out, distinguishable from her elder sisters only by her weak, grey-hued, flaccid appearance. Her first act on gaining freedom is to groom herself down, after which she proceeds to explore the gloomy, busy, crowded thoroughfares of the hive. A day or two is thus passed in gathering strength. On the second appetite returns, and she proceeds to help herself from the vats of honey and pollen bins scattered here and there among the cradles of her sisters yet prisoners. But speedily she is caught and thrust, so to speak, on to the treadmill of work which is to know no cessation during her short span of life-some six or seven weeks. Her first duties are those of nursemaid. Without instruction, or previous experience, she begins to feed her younger sisters and brothers yet in the larval stage. But besides, during her first fortnight, before she is allowed to leave the hive she and her sisters of the same age have to fulfil a variety of tasks. All the indoor work of the house falls on these Cinderellas. Not only do they, and they alone, feed the young, but they have to produce the wax and build the combs and attend to the sanitary arrangements: “they are the brewers of the honey and the keepers of the stores; they feed the queen bee on her ceaseless rounds and give the drones, their brothers, their daily rations of bee-milk”—what else these lazy creatures need they take for themselves from the honey-vats. But this is not all. They have to meet their older sisters returning from the fields and gardens laden with nectar. This is regurgitated and transferred to the pouches of the youngsters, by whom it is transformed into honey and stored in the combs in the upper region of the hive. At the end of about a fortnight these little drudges are allowed a brief respite, during the heat of the day, to emerge into the outer air and gather ideas on the world which is yet to be explored. Soon a measure of freedom is allowed, the indoor work ceases, and each takes up the new and more agreeable task of gathering pollen, and after a few days of this the more responsible task of gathering nectar is undertaken, which is continued till death ends one of the most crowded, surely, of existences. Such as are born near “swarming-time” may have the good fortune to take part in the exodus and the settling down in the new home, and some may taste yet other moments of excitement, but they are moments only. The worker bee knows no leisure for the improvement of her mind and morals. She needs none, for she has neither: she is a creature of routine, a living automaton apparently. Yet there are incidents in this wonderful community which seem too complex to be merely the result of instinct unaided, uninspired, by intelligence albeit of a nebulous kind.

The worker-bees, it has been remarked, are barren: their reproductive organs are atrophied, and by the decree, not of the queen-mother of the hive, nor of the males, but of their own caste. In spite of the fact that they are incapable of producing offspring, they, and they alone, determine who shall undertake this task; and they decree the fate that awaits those thus appointed when they can no longer fulfil this purpose.

When the queen, waxing old, and waning in fecundity, lays fewer and fewer eggs, and these only producing males, they take silent note of the fact, and at the appointed time decree the death of their Sovereign-mother. Yet they hesitate to lay violent hands on her. She, as queen, claimed the right in her early youth to slay her sister-queens, and sped them with a dagger-thrust; now her turn comes to die. But it must be a bloodless death, carried out with due ceremonial. So her daughters cluster about her, and in a mock embrace, that tightens every moment, her breath is squeezed out of her body. There are no State pensions for those who are past work, but a State execution instead. This is vastly more economical, and it may yet commend itself to some would-be social “reformers,” who will doubtless contrive to make exceptions to the rule!

The execution of a queen is not an event of common occurrence; but that of male members of the hive forms part of the ordinary routine, though coming only within the larger cycle of the year. As the summer wanes and the harvest of nectar grows perceptibly less, visions of a possible famine, and its attendant horrors, seem to arise. So heads are counted and occupations are scrutinized, when it is discovered that the only members of the community who are contributing nothing to the general well-being are the males, who are now but useless drains on the hive. None of the neighbouring hives are now likely to send forth a virgin queen to her nuptials, to which end each hive is obliged to contribute—for no hive utilizes the services of its own drones; these idle fellows, then, are “eating their heads off”—and males, too; perish the thought! While they had anything to gain from him their motto was “Feed the brute”; but now, on each, doom is pronounced. It must be admitted that a live drone at the end of summer is one of life’s failures. Notoriously unable to feed himself save upon the honey made by his sisters, and having no function in life to perform save that of mating, his very existence now is a damning witness against himself.

When the mother of the hive ceases to maintain the standard of fertility set by her exacting daughters, she is put to death stealthily, as if in an excess of devotion: she is smothered under their embraces. Towards the drones now under sentence no such consideration is to be shown. When the word goes forth, the slaughter begins, and it gathers in ferocity. It begins in a massacre of the innocents—every helpless larval drone is ruthlessly dragged from its cot and thrown out of the hive to die: there is now no crime in infanticide, nor in the most gruesome massacre that is presently to follow. The drones, all unsuspecting, are to be tolerated a brief spell longer. The cool, calculating spirit of these unsexed ones seems to realize that there is even yet a remote possibility that the services of these doomed ones may be wanted. No sooner, however, does it become clear that this chance is past, than the decree of death is made absolute, and the poor drones are suddenly and viciously attacked by half a dozen frenzied spinsters at once. Each tries to bite through the base of the victim’s wings, and succeeding in this, he is speedily pushed towards the door of the hive and out into the open, whence return is impossible, so that nothing is left but death by starvation. Some of the victims will escape in the mêlée, but only for a brief season. Such as find their way, unmaimed, to the open air, are still faced by inevitable death. To remain out is to die of starvation or cold, to return is to fall a prey to the now infuriated guards, who, strongly reinforced, stand at the doorway of the hive to intercept and dispatch these unlucky fugitives. It will be remarked that these executioners make no use of their stings; these they might be unable to withdraw from their victim’s body, in which case they, too, would die. But there is no need to run this risk, for the males, their brothers, whom they so cheerfully slay, are unarmed; they may be attacked without risk. The dreadful work, however, is soon over, and the survivors, the queen and her daughters, have the house to themselves to make the final preparations for the winter sleep, which is apparently undisturbed by qualms of conscience.

There are certain structural differences distinguishing the three types in such a hive—the queen, the drone and the worker—which must now be referred to. The queen is larger than the worker; she has a larger and longer abdomen, a longer and much-curved sting, and her eyes have fewer facets. Only vestiges remain of the wax-secreting organs, and no trace is to be found of the wonderful pollen-baskets which perform so important a function in the worker; and finally, her instincts are of a very different kind.

The “pollen-basket” of the worker is a strange contrivance. The pollen is mainly collected by the hairs which clothe the under surface of the body, from which it is scraped by special brushes of hairs which clothe the inner surface of the “metatarsus “—the big, flat joint to which are attached a series of small triangular joints, the last of which bears the claws. When the brushes are “clogged up,” the legs are crossed and the pollen is combed out by specially stiff hairs on the “tibia”—the joint immediately above the metatarsus—and the bolus thus formed is then transferred to the outer surface of the tibia, which is trough-shaped, forming the “corbiculum,” or pollen-basket. The next, or middle, pair of legs are then employed to ram the pollen well into the basket, for safe conveyance to the hive. On arrival at the combs, the bee pushes its hind-legs into a cell, or “pollen-tub,” and with a special spur dislodges the pellet of pollen and lets it fall into the tub. These are complex movements, performed without instruction and, we must suppose, without any intelligent conception of their purpose.

The drone is larger than either queen or worker, and has enormous eyes, which meet one another over the top of the head; he has no wax-secreting organs, no pollen-basket, no sting. His antennæ are longer, his hum is deeper, his sole function is to fertilize a queen, and this done, he promptly dies. Failing in his first flight, he may make yet other ventures, but the chances are that he will die without attaining the only purpose for which he exists.

The fact that he lives for some days in the hive with the queen, before her nuptial flight, apparently unaware of her presence, would seem to indicate some special “trigger” for the release of the sexual instincts. But it must be remembered that he does not attain to maturity until after his first flight, and this it is, probably, which arouses the mate-hunger. More than this, however, it is probable that coitus is possible only when on the wing, when the air-sacs become inflated, and exert pressure on the genital organs. How he recognizes the queen when on her wild flight heavenwards is unknown: possibly by scent, but more probably by the very different vibrative note of her wings, that of the male being much stronger and deeper. His continued return to the hive is a proof of his failure to justify his existence, for no drone ever experienced Love’s embrace and lived to tell the tale: hence, when the time comes, he is slain without compunction.