Students of old books on the honey-bee—and perhaps there has been more written about bees during the last two thousand years than of all other creatures put together—do not quite know what to make of Moses Rusden, who was Charles the Second’s bee-master, and wrote his “Further Discovery of Bees” in the year 1679. The wonder about Rusden is that obviously he knew so much that was true about bee-life, and yet seems, of set purpose, to have imparted so little. He was a shrewdly observant man, of lifelong experience in his craft. His system of bee-keeping would not have disgraced many an apiculturist of the present time, often yielding him a honey harvest averaging sixty pounds to the hive, which is a result not always achieved even by our foremost apiarian scientists. His hives were fitted with glass windows, through which he was continually studying his bees. He must have had endless opportunities of proving the fallacy and folly of the ancient classic notions as to bee-life. And yet we find him gravely upholding almost the entire framework of fantastic error, old even in Pliny’s time; and speaking of the king-bee with his generals, captains, and retinue, honey that was a dew divinely sent down from heaven, the miraculous propagation of bee-kind from the flowers, and all the other curious myths and fables handed down from writer to writer since the very earliest days.
But, reading on in the little time-stained, worm-eaten book, it is not very difficult to guess at last why Rusden adopted this attitude. He was the King’s bee-master, and therefore a courtier first and a naturalist afterwards. In the first flush of the Restoration, anyone who had anything to say in support of the divine right of kings was certain to catch the Royal eye. Rusden admits himself conversant with Butler’s “Feminine Monarchie,” published some fifty years before, in which the writer argues that the single great bee in a hive was really a female. To a man of Rusden’s practical experience and deductive quality of mind, this statement must have lead, and no doubt did lead, to all sorts of speculations and discoveries. But with a ruler of Charles the Second’s temperament, feminine monarchies were not to be thought of. Rusden saw at once his restrictions and his peculiar opportunity, and wrote his book on bees, which is really an ingenious attempt to show that the system of a self-ruling commonwealth is a violation of nature, and that, whether for bees or men, government under a king is the divinely ordained state.
Whether, however, Rusden was deliberately insincere, or actually succeeded in blinding himself conveniently for his own purposes, it must be admitted not only that he argued the case with singular adroitness, but that never did facts adapt themselves so readily to either conscious or unconscious misrepresentation. In the glass-windowed hives of the Royal bee-house at Saint James’s, he was able to show the King a nation of creatures evidently united under a common rule, labouring together in harmony and producing works little short of miraculous to the mediæval eye. He saw that these creatures were of two sorts, each going about its duty after its kind, but that in each colony there was one bee, and only one, which differed entirely from the rest. To this single large bee all the others paid the greatest deference. It was cared for and nourished, and attended assiduously in its progress over the combs. All the humanly approved tokens of royalty were manifest about it. No wonder the King’s bee-master was not slow in recognising that, in those troublous times, he could do his patron no greater service than by pointing out to the superstitious and ignorant multitude—still looking askance at the restored monarchy—such indisputable evidence in nature of Charles’s parallel right.
And perhaps nature has never been at such pains to conceal her true processes from the vulgar eye as in this case of the honey-bee. If Rusden ever suspected that the one large bee in each colony was really the mother of all the rest, and had set himself to prove it, he would have found the whole array of visible facts in opposition to him. If ever a truth seemed established beyond all reasonable doubt, it was that the ordinary male-and-female principle, pertaining throughout the rest of creation, was abrogated in the single instance of the honey-bee. The ancients explained this anomaly as a special gift from the gods, and the bees were supposed to discover the germs of bee-life in certain kinds of flowers and to bring them home to the cells for development. Rusden improved upon this idea by assigning to his king-bee the duty of fertilising these embryos when they were placed in the cells, for he could not otherwise explain a fact of which he was perfectly well aware—that the large bee travelled the combs unceasingly, thrusting its body into each cell in turn. Rusden also held that the worker-bees were females, but only—as Freemasons would say—in a speculative manner. They neither laid eggs nor bore young. Their maternal duties consisted only in gathering the essence of bee-life from the blossoms and nursing and tending the young bees when they emerged from their cradle-cells. The drones were a great difficulty to Rusden. To admit them to be males—as some held even in his day—would have been against the declared object of his book, as tending to entrench upon royal prerogatives. Luckily, this truth was as easy of apparent refutation as all the rest. No one had ever detected any traffic of the sexes amongst bees either in or out of the hives; nor, indeed, is such detection possible. The fact that the queen-bee has concourse with the drone only once in her whole life, and that their meeting takes place in the upper air far out of reach of human observation, is knowledge only of yesterday. In Rusden’s time such a marvel was never even suspected. As the drones, therefore, were never seen to approach the worker bees or to notice them in any way, and as also young bees were bred in the hives during many months when no drones existed at all, Rusden’s ingenuity was equal to the task of bringing them into line with his theory.
If he had lived a few decades earlier, and it had been Cromwell, instead of the heartless, middle-aged rake of a sovereign, whom he had to propitiate, no doubt Rusden would have asked his public to swallow Pliny’s whole apiarian philosophy at a gulp. Bee-life would then have been held up as a foreshadowing of celestial conditions, and the facts would have lent themselves to this view equally as well. But his task was to represent the economy of the hive as a clear proof of divine authority in kingship, and it must be conceded that, as far as knowledge went in those days, he established his case.
His book was published under the ægis of the Royal Society, and “by his Majestie’s especial Command,” which was less a testimony of the King’s love for natural history than of his political astuteness. Apart, however, from its peculiar mission, the book is interesting as a sidelight on the old bee-masters and their ways. Probably it represents very fairly the extent of knowledge at the time, which had evidently advanced very little since the days of Virgil. Rusden taught, with the ancients, that honey was a secretion from the stars, and that wax was gathered from the flowers, as well as the generative matter before mentioned. He had one theory which seems to have been essentially his own. The little lumps of many-coloured pollen, which the worker-bees fetch home so industriously in the breeding season, he held to be the actual substance of the young bees to come, in an elementary state. These, he tells us, were placed in the cells, having absorbed the feminine virtues from their bearers on the way. The king-bee then visited each in turn, vivifying them with his essence, after which they had nothing to do but grow into perfect bees. He got over the difficulty of the varying sexes of the bees bred in a hive by asserting that these lumps of animable matter were created in the flowers, either female, or neuter—as he called the drones—or royal, as the case might be. Having denied the drones any part in the production of their species, or in furnishing the needs of the hive, Rusden was hard put to it to find a use for them in a system where it would have been lèse-majesté to suppose anything superfluous or amiss. He therefore hits upon an idea which, curiously enough, embodies matter still under dispute at the present time, although it is being slowly recognised as a truth. Rusden says the use of the drones is to take the place of the other bees in the hive when these are mostly away honey-gathering. Their great bodies act as so many warming stoves, supplying the necessary heat to the hatching embryos and the maturing stores of honey. It is well known that drones gather together side by side, principally in the remoter parts of the hive, often completely covering these outer combs. They seldom rouse from their lethargy of repletion to take their daily flight until about midday, when most of the ingathering work is over, and the hive is again fairly populous with worker-bees. Probably, therefore, Rusden was quite right in his theory, which, hundreds of years after, is only just beginning to be accepted as a fact.
Popular beliefs as to the ways of the honey-bee, unlike those relating to many other insects, are surprisingly accurate, so far as they go. But, dealing with such a complex thing as hive-life, it is well-nigh impossible to have understanding on any single point without going very much farther than the ordinary tabloid-method of knowledge can carry us. This is especially true with regard to pollen, and the uses to which it is put within the hive. The hand-books on bee-keeping usually tell us that pollen is employed with honey as food for the young bees when in the larval state; but this is so wide a generalisation that it amounts to almost positive error.
As a matter of fact, the pollen in its raw condition is given only to the drone-larva, and this only towards the end of its life as a grub. For the first three days of the drone-larva’s existence, and in the case of the young worker-bee for the whole five days of the larval period, the pollen is administered by the nurse-bees in a pre-digested state. After partial assimilation, both the pollen and the nectar are regurgitated by these nurse-bees, and form together a pearly-white fluid—veritable bee-milk—on which the young grubs thrive in an extraordinary way.
There are few things more fascinating than to watch a hive of bees at work on a fine June morning, and to note how the pollen is carried in. With a prosperous stock, thousands of bees must pass within the space of a few minutes, each bee dragging behind her a double load of this substance. Very often, in addition to the half-globes of pollen which she carries on her thighs, the bee will be smothered in it from head to foot, as in gold-dust. If you track her into the hive, one curious point will be noted. No matter how fast she may go, or what frantic spirit of labour may possess the entire colony, the pollen-laden bee is never in a hurry to get rid of her load. She will waste precious time wandering over the crowded combs, continually shaking herself, as though showing off her finery to her admiring relatives; and it may be some minutes before she finally selects a half-filled pollen-cell and proceeds to kick off her load. The different kinds of pollen are packed into the cells indiscriminately, the bee using her head as a ram to press each pellet home. When the cell is full it is never sealed over with a waxen capping, as in the case of the honey-stores, but is left open or covered with a thin film of honey, apparently to preserve it from the air. The nurse-bees, who are the young workers under a fortnight old, help themselves from these pollen-bins. They also frequently stop a pollen-bearer as she hurries through the crowd, and nibble the pollen from her thighs.
Throughout the season there is hardly an imaginable colour or shade of colour which is not represented in the pollen carried into a beehive; and with the aid of a microscope it is not difficult to identify the source of each kind. In May, before the great field-crops have come into bloom, the pollen is almost entirely gathered from wild flowers, and consists of various rich shades of yellow and brown. By far the heaviest burdens at this time are obtained from the dandelion. The pollen from this flower is a peculiarly bright orange, and is easily recognised under a strong glass by its grains, which are in the form of regular dodecahedrons, thickly covered all over with short spikes.
It is well known that the honey-bee confines herself during each journey to one species of flower, and this is proved by the microscope. It is not easy to intercept a homing bee laden with pollen. On alighting before the hive she runs in so quickly that the keenest eye and deftest hand are necessary to effect her capture. But with the aid of a miniature butterfly-net and a little practice it can generally be done; and then the pellet of pollen will be found to consist almost invariably of one kind of grain. But it is not always so. The honey-bee, as a reasoning creature, does not and cannot be expected to do anything invariably. Among some hundreds of these pollen-lumps examined under the microscope I have occasionally found grains of pollen differing from the bulk. Perhaps there are no two species of flower which have pollen-grains exactly alike in colour, shape, and size, and in most the differences are very striking. In the cases mentioned the bulk of the pollen was made up of long oval yellow grains divided lengthwise into three lobes or gores, which were easily identifiable as coming from the figwort. The isolated grains were very minute spheres thickly studded with blunt spikes—obviously from the daisy. The figwort is a famous source of bee-provender in spring time, and its pollen can be seen flowing into the hives at that time in an almost unbroken stream of brilliant chrome-yellow. The brownish-gold masses that are also being constantly carried in are from the willow; and where the hives are near woodlands the bluebells yield the bees enormous quantities of pollen of a dull yellowish white.
It is interesting that all these various materials, so carefully kept asunder when gathered, are for the most part inextricably mingled within the hive. Obviously the system of visiting only one species of flower on each foraging journey can have no relation to pollen-gathering; nor does it seem to apply to the nectar obtained at the same time. It cannot be inferred that the contents of each honey-cell are brewed from only one source, because it has been proved that bees do blend the various nectars together when several crops are simultaneously in flower. A honey-judge can easily detect the flavours of heather and white-clover in the same sample of honey by taste alone. But there is another and much more conclusive way of deciding the source from which a particular sample of honey has been obtained. In the purest and most mature honeys there are always a few accidental grains of pollen, invisible to the eye, yet easily detected under a strong glass. And these may be taken as almost infallible guides to the species of flowers visited by the foraging bees. The only explanation which seems possible, therefore, of the honey-bee’s care to visit only one kind of blossom on each journey is that it is done for the sake of the plant itself, cross-fertilisation being thus rendered extremely improbable.
When once the bee-man has succumbed to the fascination of the microscope, there is very little chance that he will ever return to his old panoramic view of things. He goes on from wonder to wonder, and the horizon of the new world he has entered continually broadens with each marvelling step. To the old rule-of-thumb bee-keepers pollen was mere bee-bread; and the fact that the bees preferred one kind to another did not greatly concern them. But at a time when the small-holder is beginning to feel his feet, and the question of the feasibility of planting for bee-forage is certain to arise, it is necessary to know why bees gather this important part of their diet from particular kinds of flowers, while leaving severely alone others which appear to be equally attractive. To this question the microscope supplies a sufficient answer.
Chemists have determined that nectar is the heat and force-producer in the food of the bee, while pollen supplies its nitrogenous tissue-building qualities. It is evident that bees select certain pollens for their superior nutritive powers, just as in bread-making we prefer wheat to any other species of grain. In the kinds of pollen most in favour with bees a good microscope will reveal the fact that the pollen-grains are often accompanied by a certain amount of true farina, as well as essential oils, which must greatly enhance their food-value. And in those crops generally neglected by bees, such as daisies and buttercups, those accompaniments appear to be absent. The dandelion is especially rich in a thick yellow oil, which the bees carry away with the pollen; while two plants in particular of which the bees are especially fond—the crocus and the box—have a large amount of this farina mingled with the true pollen.
On Warrilow Bee-Farm, where it lay under the green lip of the Sussex Downs, there was always food for wonder, whether the year was at its ebb or its flow. But in July of a good season the busy life of the farm reached a culminating point.
The ordinary man, in search of excitement, distraction, the heady wine served out only to those who stand in the fighting-line of the world, would hardly seek these things in a little sleepy village sunk fathoms deep in English summer greenery. But, nevertheless, with the coming of the great honey-flow to Warrilow came all these subtle human necessities. If you would keep up with the bee-master and his men at this stirring time, you must be ready for a break-neck gallop from dawn to dusk of the working day, and often a working night to follow. While the honey-flow endured, muscles and nerves were tried to their breaking-point. It was a race between the great centrifugal honey-extractor and the toiling millions of the hives; and time and again, in exceptionally favourable seasons, the bees would win; the honey-chambers would clog with the interminable sweets, and the dreaded atrophy of contentment would seize upon the best of the hives, with the result that they would gather no more honey.
A week of hot bright days and warm still nights, with here and there a gentle shower to hearten the fields of clover and sainfoin; and then the fight between the bee-master and his millions would begin in earnest. There would be no more quiet pipes, strolling and talking among the hives: the Bee-Master of Warrilow was a general now, with all a great commander’s stern absorption in the conduct of a difficult campaign. Often, with the first grey of the summer’s morning, you would hear his footsteps on the red-tiled path of the garden below, as he hurried off to the bee-farm, and presently the bell in the little turret over the extracting-house would clang out a reveille to his men, and draw them from their beds in the neighbouring village to another day of work, perhaps the most trying work by which men win their bread.
It is nothing in the ordinary way to lift a super-chamber weighing twenty pounds or so. But to lift it by imperceptible degrees, place an empty rack in its place, return the full rack to the hive as an upper story, and to do it all so quietly and gently that the bees have not realised the onslaught on their home until the operation is complete, is quite another thing. And a long day of this wary, delicate handling of heavy weights, at arm’s length, under broiling sunshine, is one of the most nerve-wearing and back-breaking experiences in the world.
One of the mistakes made by the unknowing in bee-craft is that the bee-veil is never used among professional men. But the truth is that even the oldest, most experienced hand is glad enough, at times, to fall back behind this, his last line of defence. All depends upon the momentary temper of the bees. There are times when every hive on the farm is as gentle as a flock of sheep, and it is possible to take any liberty with them. At other times, and apparently under much the same conditions, stocks of bees with the steadiest of reputations will resent the slightest interference, while the mere approach to others may mean a furious attack. No true bee-man is afraid of the wickedest bees that ever flew, but it is only the novice who will disdain necessary precautions. Even the Bee-Master of Warrilow was seldom seen without a wisp of black net round the crown of his ancient hat, ready to be let down at a moment’s notice if the bees showed any inclination to sting.
In a long vista of memorable days spent at Warrilow, one stands out clear above all the rest. It was in July of a famous honey-year. The hay had long been carried, and the second crops of sainfoin and Dutch clover were making their bravest show of blossom in the fields. It was a stifling day of naked light and heat, with a fierce wind abroad hotter even than the sunshine. The deep blue of the sky came right down to the earth-line. The farthest hills were hard and bright under the universal glare. And on the bee-farm, as I came through the gap in the dusty hedgerow, I saw that every man had his veil close drawn down. The bee-master hailed me from his crowded corner.
“Y’are just to the nick!” he called, in his broadest Sussex. “’Tis stripping-day wi’ us, an’ I can do wi’ a dozen o’ ye! Get on your veil, d’rectly-minute, an’ wire in t’ot!”
The fierce hot wind surged through the little city of hives, scattering the bees like chaff in all directions, and rousing in them a wild-cat fury. Overhead the sunny air was full of bees, striving out and home; and from every hive there came a shrill note, a tremulous, high-pitched roar of work, half-baffled, driven through against all odds and hindrances, a note that bore in upon you an irresistible sense of fear. I pulled on the bee-veil without more ado.
“Stripping-day” was always the hardest day of the year at Warrilow. It meant that some infallible sign of the approaching end of the harvest had been observed, and that all extractable honey must be immediately removed from the hives. A change of weather was brewing, as the nearness of the hills foretold. There might be weeks of flood and tempest coming, when the hives could not be opened. Overnight there had been a ringed moon, and the morning broke hot and boisterous, with an ominous clearness everywhere. By midday the glass was tumbling down. The bee-master took one look at it, then called all hands together. “Strip!” he said laconically; and all work in extracting-house and packing-sheds was abandoned, and every man braced himself to the job.
The hives were arranged in long double rows, back to back, with a footway between wide enough to allow the passage of the honey barrow. This was not unlike a baker’s hand-cart, and contained empty combs, which were to be exchanged for the full combs from the hives. I found myself sharing a row with the bee-master, and already infused with the glowing, static energy for which he was renowned. The process of stripping the hives varied little with each colony, but the bees themselves furnished variety enough and to spare. In working for comb-honey, the racks or sections are tiered up one above the other until as many as five stories may be built over a good stock. But where the honey is to be extracted from the comb another system is followed. There is then only one super-chamber, holding ten frames side by side, and these frames are removed separately as fast as the bees fill and seal them, their place being taken by the empty combs extracted the day before.
The whole art of this work consists in disturbing the bees as little as possible. At ordinary times the roof of the hive is removed, the “quilts” which cover the comb-frames are then very gently peeled away, and the frames with their adhering bees are placed side by side in the clearing-box. The honey-chamber is then furnished with empty combs, and the coverings and roof replaced. On nine days out of ten this can be done without a veil or any subduing contrivance; and the bees which were shut up with the honey in the clearing-box will soon come out through the traps in the lid and fly back to their hives. But when time presses, and several hundred hives must be gone through in a few hours, a different system is adopted. Speed is now a main desideratum in the work, and on stripping-day at Warrilow resort is made to a contrivance seldom seen there at other times. This is simply a square of cloth saturated with weak carbolic acid, the most detested, loathsome thing in bee-comity. Directly the comb-frames are laid bare these cloths are drawn over them, and in a few moments every bee has crowded down terror-stricken into the lower regions of the hive, leaving the honey-chamber free for instant and swift manipulation.
If you go to the bee-garden early of a fine summer’s morning you will be struck by the singular quiet of the place. All the woods and hedgerows are ringing with busy life. The rooks are cawing homeward with already hours of strenuous work behind them. The cattle in the meadows are well through their first cud. But as yet the bee-city is as still as the sleeping village around it. Now and again a bee drops down from the sky on a deserted hive-threshold with sleepy hum, and runs past the guards at the gate. But these are bees that have wandered too far afield overnight, tempted by the sunny warmth of the evening. The dusk has caught them, and obliterated their flying-marks. They have perforce camped out under some broad leaf, to be wakened by the earliest light of morning and hurry home with their belated loads.
The sun is well up over the hillbrow before the visible life of the bee-garden begins to rouse in earnest. The water-seekers are the first to appear. Every hive has its traditional dipping-place, generally the oozy margin of some neighbouring pond, where the house-martins have been wheeling and crying since the first grey of dawn. Now the bees’ clear undertone begins to mingle with the chippering chorus. In a little while there is a thin straight line of humming music stretched between the hives and the pond: it could not be straighter if a surveyor had made it with his level. Again a little while, and this long searchlight of melody thrown out by the bee-garden veers to the north. You may track it straight over copse and meadow, seeing not a bee overhead, but guided unerringly by the arrow-flight of music, until, on the far hillside, it is lost in a perfect roar of sound. Here the white-clover is in almost full blossom again: in southern England at least it is always the second crop of clover that yields the most plentiful harvest to the hives.
It must be a disturbing thing to those kindergarten moralists who hold the bee up to youth for an example of industry and prudence to learn that she is by no means an early riser; though, at this time of year, she is undoubtedly both wealthy and wise. For it is her very wisdom that now makes her a lie-abed. When the iron is hot, she will not be slow in striking. But it is nectar, not dewdrops, from which she makes her honey. Very wisely she waits until the sun has drunk up the dew from the clover-bells, and then she hurries forth to garner their undiluted sweets. Even then, perhaps, three-fourths of her burden will be carried uselessly. In the brewing-vats of the hive the nectar must stand and steam until three parts of its original bulk has evaporated, and its sugar has been inverted into grape-sugar. Then it is honey, but not before. When we see the fanning-army at work by the entrance of a hive, it is not alone an undoubted passion for pure air that moves the bees to such ingenious activity. In the height of the honey season many pints of vaporised liquid must be given off by the maturing stores in the course of a day and night, and all this water must be got rid of. Herein is shown the wisdom of the bee-master who makes the walls of his hives of a material that is a bad conductor of heat. It is a first necessity of health to the bees that the moisture in the air, which they are incessantly fanning out at this time, should not condense until it is safely wafted from the hive. A cold-walled hive can easily become a quagmire.
The bee-garden is quiet now in the sweet virgin light of the summer’s morning; but the thought of it as containing so many houses of sleep, true of the village with its thatched human dwellings, could not well be farther from the truth in regard to the village of hives. There is little sleep in a bee-hive in summer. Of any common period of rest, of any quiet night when all but the sentinels at the gate are slumbering, of any general time of relaxation, there is absolutely none. Each individual bee—forager or nurse, comb-builder or storekeeper—works until she can work no more, and then stops by the way, or crawls into the nearest empty cell for a brief siesta. But the life of the hive itself never halts, never wavers in summertime, night or day. Go to it morning, noon, or night in the hot July season, and you will always find it driving onward unremittingly. The crowd is surging to and fro. There is ever the busy deep labour-note. Its people are building, brewing, wax-making, scavenging, wet-nursing, being born and dying: it is all going on without pause or break inside those four reverberating walls, while you stand without in the dew-soaked grass and level sunbeams wondering how it is that all the world can be at full flood-tide of merry life and music while these mysterious hive people give scarce a sign.
It is at night chiefly that the combs are built. The wax, that is a secretion from the bees’ own bodies, will generate only under great heat, and the temperature of the hive is naturally greatest when all the family is at home. In the night also such works as transferring a large mass of honey from one comb to another are undertaken. It is curious to note that at night time the drones get together in the remotest parts of the hive, apparently to keep up the heat in these distant quarters, which are away from the main cluster of worker-bees. There is hardly another thing in creation, perhaps, with a worse name than the drone-bee. But like all bad things he is not so bad as he is represented. Apart from his main and obvious use, the drone fulfils at least one very important office. His habit is not to leave his snug corner until close upon midday. Thus, when every able-bodied worker bee is out foraging, the temperature of the hive is sustained by the presence of the drones, and the young bee-brood is in no danger of chilling.
Though the supreme direction of all affairs in a bee-hive falls to the lot of the worker-bees, the queen-mother is second to none in industry. At this time of year she goes about her task with a dogged patience and assiduity pathetic to witness. She may have to supply from two thousand to three thousand brood-cells with eggs in the course of a single day, and she is for ever wandering through the crowded corridors of the hive looking for empty cradles. The old bee-masters believed that the queen was always accompanied in these unending promenades by exactly a dozen bees, whom they called the Twelve Apostles. It is true that whenever the queen stops in her march she is immediately surrounded by a number of bees, who form themselves into a ring, keeping their heads ceremoniously towards her. But close observation reveals the fact that the queen-bee is never followed about by a permanent retinue. When she moves to go on, the ring breaks and disperses before her; but the bees who gather round her on her next halt are those who happen to occupy the space of comb she has then reached.
The truth seems to be that she is passed from “hand to hand” over the combs of the brood-nest, and is stopped wherever a cell requires replenishing. Each bee that she encounters on her path turns front and touches her gently with her antenna. The queen constantly returns these salutes as she moves, and it looks exactly as if she were going the rounds of her domain and collecting information. Often she is stopped by half a dozen bees in a solid phalanx, and carefully headed off in a new direction. She looks into every cell as she goes, and when she has lowered her body into a cell, the Apostles instantly gather about her, with strokings and caresses. But their number is seldom twelve. It varies according to the bulk and length of the queen herself, and is more often sixteen than a dozen.
In the hedgerow that surrounds the bee-garden the wrens and robins have been singing all the morning long. Still a few pale sulphur buds remain on the evening-primroses. The balsams make a glowing patch of magenta by the garden gate. Over the door porch of the old thatched cottage purple clematis climbs bravely; and the nasturtiums still flaunt their scarlet and gold in the sunny angle of the wall. But, for all the colour and the music, the hot sun, and the serene blue air overhead, you can never forget that it is October. If the towering elm-trees by the lane-side showed no fretting of amber in their greenery, nor the beeches sent down their steady rain of russet, there would still be one indubitable mark of the season—the voice of the hives themselves.
Rich and wavering and low in the sweet autumn sunlight, it comes over to you now with the very spirit of rest in every halting tone. There is work, of a kind, doing in the bee-garden. A steady tide of bees is stemming out from and home to every hive. But there is none of the press and busy clamour of bygone summer days. It is only a make-believe of duty. Each bee, as she swings up into the sunshine, hovers a while before setting easy sail for the ivy in the lane; and, on returning, she may bask for whole minutes together on the hot hive-roof. There is no sort of hurry; little as there may be to do abroad, there is less at home.
But to one section of the bee-community, these slack October hours bring no cessation of toil. The guards at the gate must redouble their vigilance. Cut off from most of their natural supplies, the yellow pirates—the wasps—are continually prowling about the entrance; and, in these lean times, will dare all dangers for a fill of honey. Incessant fierce skirmishes take place on the alighting-board. The guards hurl themselves at each adventuress in turn. The wasp, calculating coward that she is, invariably declines battle, and makes off; but only to return a little later, hoping for the unwary moment that is sure to come. While the whole strength of the picket is engaged with other would-be pilferers, she slips round the scuffling crew, and plunges into the fragrant gloom of the hive.
The variation in temperament among the members of a bee-colony is never better illustrated than by the way in which these marauders are received and dealt with. The wasp never tries to pick a way to the honey-stores through the close packed ranks of the bees. She keeps to the sides of the hive, and works her way up by a series of quick darts whenever a path opens before her. Evidently her plan is to avoid contact with the home-keeping bees, which, at this time of year, have little more to do than loiter over the combs, or tuck themselves away in the empty brood-cells by the hour together. But in her desultory advance, she often cannons against single bees; and then she may be either mildly interrogated, fiercely challenged, or may be allowed to pass with a friendly stroke of the antennæ, as though she were an orthodox member of the hive. Again, you may see her recognised for a stranger by three or four workers simultaneously. She will be surrounded and closely questioned. The bees draw back and confer among themselves in obvious doubt. The wasp knows better than to await the result of their deliberations; by the time they look for her again, she is gone.
She carries her life in her hand, and well she knows it. The farther she goes, the more suspicious and menacing the bees become. Now she has wild little scuffles here and there with the boldest of them, but her superior adroitness and pace save her at every turn. It is about an even wager that she will reach the brimming honey-cells, load herself up to the chin, and escape home to her paper-stronghold with her spoils.
As often as not, however, these hive-robbing wasps pay the last great price for their temerity. Those who study bee-life closely and unremittingly, year after year, find it difficult to escape the conclusion that there are certain bees in the crowd who are mentally and physically in advance of their sisters. The notion of the old bee-keepers—that there were generals and captains as well as rank-and-file in the hive—seems, in fact, to be not entirely without latter-day confirmation. And it is just the chance of falling in with one of these bees that constitutes, for the wasp, the main risk when robbing the hives.
If this happens, there is no longer any doubt of the turn affairs are to take. At an unlucky moment the wasp brushes against one of these hive-constables and instead of indifference, or, at most, a spiteful tweak of the leg or wing in passing, she finds herself suddenly at deadly grips. The bee’s attack is as swift as it is furious. Seizing the yellow honey-thief with all six legs, she hacks away at her with her jaws, at the same time curving her body inwards with her cruel sting bared to the hilt. Even now, although more than equal to one bee at any time, the policy of the wasp is to refuse the fight, and to run. Her long legs give her a better reach. She forces her adversary away, disengages, and charges off towards the dim light of the entrance.
In all that follows, this is the beacon that guides her. If she could get a clear course, her greater speed would soon out-distance all pursuit. But the sudden clash of arms in the quiet of the hive has an extraordinary effect on the sluggish colony. The alarm spreads on every side. Wherever the wasp runs now she is met with snapping jaws and detaining embraces. As she rushes madly down the comb, she is continually pulled up in full flight by bees hanging on to her legs, her wings, her black waving antenna. A dozen times she shakes them all off, and speeds on, the spot of light and safety in the distance ever growing brighter and larger. But she seldom escapes with her life if affairs have reached this pass. The way now is alive with enemies. She is stopped and headed off in all directions. Trying this way and that for a loophole, she finally gives it up and turns on her tracks, bewildered and panic-stricken, only to rush straight into the midst of more foes.
The end is always the same. Another of the stalwarts spies her, and in a moment the two are locked in berserk conflict. Together they drop down between the combs and thud to the bottom of the hive. Here it is hard to tell what happens. The fight is so fierce and sharp, and the two whirl round and tumble over and over together so wildly that you can make out little else than a spinning blur of brown and yellow. A great bright drop of honey flies off: in her extremity the wasp has disgorged her spoils. Perhaps for an instant the warriors may get wedged up in a corner, and then you may see that they are not lunging at random with their stilettos, but each is trying for a side-thrust on the body; these mail-clad creatures are vulnerable to each other only at one point—the spiracles, or breathing-holes. Often the wasp deals the first fatal blow, and the bee drops off mortally hurt. She may even dispose of three or four of her assailants thus in quick succession. But each time another bee closes with her at once. For the wasp there can only be one end to it. Sooner or later she gets the finishing stroke.
And then there follows a grim little comedy. The bee, torn and ragged as she is from the incessant gnashing of those razor-edged yellow jaws, nevertheless pauses not a moment. She grips her dying adversary by the base of the wing, and struggles off with her towards the entrance of the hive. It is a hard job, but she succeeds at last. Alternately pushing her burden before her, or dragging it behind, at length she wins out into the open, and, with a final desperate effort, tumbles the wasp over the edge of the footboard down into the grass below. Yet this is not enough. The victory must be celebrated in the old warrior fashion. Rent and bleeding and exhausted as she is, she finds she can still fly. And up into the mellow sunbeams of the October morning she sweeps, giddily and uncertainly, piercing the air with her shrill song of triumph. Through the murmurous quiet of the bee-garden, it rings out like a cry in the night.
It is well-nigh two months now since the hives were packed down for the winter, and the bees are flying as thick as on many a summer’s day.
Yet no one could mistake their flight for the summer flight. It is not the straight-away eager rush up into the blue vault of the sunny morning—high away over hedgerow and village roof-top towards the clover-fields, whitening the far-off hillside with their tens of thousands of honey-brimming bells. It is rather the vagrant, purposeless hanging-about of an habitually busy people forced to make holiday. Through it all there runs the pathetic interest in trifles, half-hearted and wholly artificial, that you see among the lolling crowd of men when a great strike is on—the thoughtful kicking at odd pebbles; stride-measuring on the flag-stones; little vortices of excitement got up over minute incidents that would otherwise pass unnoticed; the earnest flagellation of memory over past happenings more trivial still.
Thus the bees idle about and wander, on this still November morning, doing just the things you would never expect a bee to do. The greater number of them merely take long desultory reaches a-wing through the sunshine, going off in one objectless direction, turning about at the end of a few yards with just as little apparent reason, coming back to the hive at length on no more obvious errand than that, where there is nothing to do, doing it in another place bears at least the semblance of achievement.
But many of them succeed in conjuring up an almost ludicrous assumption of business. One comes driving out of the hive-entrance at a great pace, designedly, as you would think, going out of her way to bustle the few bees lounging there, as if the entrance-board were still thronged with the streaming crowd of summer days foregone. She stops an instant to rub her eyes clear of the hive-darkness; tries her wings a little to make sure of their powers for a heavy load; then, with a deep note like the twang of a guitar-string, launches out into the sun-steeped air. But it is all a vain pretence, and well she knows it. Watch her as she flies, and you will see her busy ding-dong pace slacken a dozen yards away. She fetches a turn or two above the leafless apple-branches of the garden, with the rest of the chanting, workless crew. She may presently start off again at a livelier speed than ever, as though vexed at being allured, even for a moment, from the duty that calls her away to the mist-clad hill. But it always ends in the same fashion. A little later she is fluttering down on the threshold of the silent hive, and running busily in, keeping up the transparent fiction, you see, to the last.
An Officious Dame
Many more set themselves to look for sweets where they must know there is little likelihood of finding any. Scarce one goes near the glowing belt of pompons rimming the garden on every side. But here is one bee, an ancient dame, with ragged wings and shiny thorax, poised outside a cranny in the old brick wall, and examining it with serious, shrill inquiry. She is obviously making-believe, to while away the time, that it is a choice blossom full of nectar. She knows it is nothing of the kind; but that will neither check her ardour nor expedite the piece of play-acting. She spins it out to the utmost, and leaves the one dusty crevice at last only to go through the same performance at the next.
I often wonder wherein lies the fascination to a hive-bee of an open window or door. Sitting here ledgering in the little office of the bee-farm—where no honey, nor the smell of honey, is ever allowed to come—sooner or later, in the quiet of the golden morning, the familiar voice peals out. It is startling at first, unless you are well used to it—this sudden high-pitched clamour breaking the silence about you; and the oldest bee-man must lay down pen or rule, and look up from his work to scan the intruder.
She has darted in at the door, and has stopped in mid-air a foot or two within the room. The sound she makes is very different from that of a bee in ordinary flight. You cannot mistake its meaning; it is one long-drawn-out, musical note of exclamation, an intense, reiterated wonder at all about her—the subdued light, the walls covered with book-shelves, the littered table, and the vast wingless, drab-coloured creature sitting in the midst of it all, like a funnel-spider in his snare. Bees entering a room in this way seldom stop more than a second or two, and, more rarely still, alight. As a rule, they are gone the next moment as swiftly as they came, leaving the impression that their quick retreat was due to a sudden accession of fear; just as children, venturing into some dark unwonted place, at first boldly enough, will suddenly turn tail and flee, with terror hard upon their heels.
But what should bring bees into such unlikely situations during these warm bright breaks in the wintry weather, when they seldom or never venture out of the range of hives and fields in the season of plenty? It would be curious to know whether people who have never kept bees, nor handled hives, are habitually pried upon in this way; or whether it is only among bee-men the thing occurs. Naturalists are commonly agreed that bees possess an extraordinary sense of smell; indeed, the fact is patent to all who know anything of hive-life. Now, years of stinging render the bee-master immune to the ordinary results of a prod from a bee’s acid-charged stiletto. There is only a sharp prick, a little irritation at the moment, but seldom any after-effects of swelling or inflammation, local or general. But all this injection of formic acid under the skin year after year might very well have a cumulative effect, so that the much-stung bee-man would eventually acquire in his own person the permanent odour of the hive. And this, scented afar off, may well be the attraction that brings these roving scrutineers to places having, in themselves, no sort of interest to the winged hive-people.
The Perils of “Immunity”
The mention of stinging brings back a thought that has often occurred to me. Do lovers of honey ever quite realise the price that must be paid before their favourite sweet is there for them on the breakfast-table, filling the room with the mingled perfume from a whole countryside? It is easy to talk of immunity from the effect of bee-stings; but the truth is that this immunity means, for the bee-master, no more than power to go on with his work in spite of the stinging. And this power is not a permanent one. It is brought about by incessant pricks from the living poisoned needle; the ordeal must be continuous, or the immunity will soon pass away. Over-care in handling bees is good only up to a certain point. The bee-man who, by continual practice, has brought this gentlest art to its highest perfection, so that he can do what he likes with his own bees without fear of harm, has, in a sense, created for himself a kind of fools’ paradise. All the time his once dear-bought privilege is slowly forsaking him. He is like the Listerist faddist, who so destroys all disease germs in his vicinity that his natural disease-resisting organisation becomes atrophied through want of work. Then, perhaps, his precautions are upheld for a season, whereupon a particularly virulent microbe happens by; and, finding the house empty, swept, and garnished, calls in the seven devils with a will.
Such a contingency is always in wait for the stay-at-home, never-stung bee-master of neighbourly proclivities. Sooner or later he will be called to help some maladroit in bee-craft, whose bees have been thoroughly vitiated by years of “monkeying.” And then the rod will come out of pickle to a lively tune. Of course, a little stinging is nothing; but there is no doubt that, with anything over a dozen stings or so at a time, the most hardened and experienced bee-man may easily stand, for a minute or two at least, in danger of losing his life.
So it happened to me once. I had gone to look at a neighbour’s stocks. The bees were as quiet as lambs until I came to the seventh hive; and then, with hardly a note of warning, they set upon me like a pack of flying bull-dogs. It is long enough ago now, but I can still give a pretty accurate account of the symptoms of acute formic-acid poisoning. It began with a curious pricking and burning over the entire inner surface of the mouth and throat. This rapidly spread, until my whole body seemed on fire, and the target, as it were, for millions of red-hot darts. Then first my tongue and lips, and every other part of head and neck, in quick succession, began to swell. My eyes felt as though they were being driven out of my head. My breathing machinery seized up, and all but stopped. A giddy congestion of brain followed. Finally, sight and hearing failed, and then almost consciousness.
I can just remember crawling away, and thrusting head and shoulders deep into a thick lilac bush, where the bees ceased to molest me. But it was a good hour or more before I could hold the smoker straight again, and get on with the next stock.
There are few things more mystifying to the student of bee-life than the way in which winter is passed in the hive. Probably nineteen out of every twenty people, who take a merely theoretical interest in the subject, entertain no doubt on the matter. Bees hibernate, they will tell you—pass the winter in a state of torpor, just as many other insects, reptiles, and animals have been proved to do. And, though the truth forces itself upon scientific investigators that there is no such thing as hibernation, in the accepted sense of the word, among hive-bees, the perplexing part of the whole question is that, as far as modern observers understand it, the honey-bee ought to hibernate, even if, as a matter of fact, she does not.
For consider what a world of trouble would be saved if, at the coming of winter, the worker-bees merely got together in a compact cluster in their warm nook, with the queen in their midst; and thenceforward slept the long cold months away, until the hot March sun struck into them with the tidings that the willows—first caterers for the year’s winged myriads—were in golden flower once more; and there was nothing to do but rouse, and take their fill. It would revolutionise the whole aspect of bee-life, and, to all appearances, vastly for the better. There would be no more need to labour through the summer days, laying up winter stores. Life could become for the honey-bee what it is to most other insects—merry and leisurely. There would be time for dancing in the sunbeams, and long siestas under rose-leaves; and it would be enough if each little worker took home an occasional full honey-sac or two for the babies, instead of wearing out nerve and body in all that desperate toiling to and fro.
Yet, for some inscrutable reason, the honey-bee elects to keep awake—uselessly awake, it seems—throughout the four months or so during which outdoor work is impossible; and to this apparently undesirable, unprofitable end, she sacrifices all that makes such a life as hers worth the living from a human point of view.
Restlessness, and the Reason for It
You can, however, seldom look at wild Nature’s ways from the human standpoint without danger of postulating too much, or, worse still, leaving some vital, though invisible thing out of the argument. And this latter, on a little farther consideration, proves to be what we are now doing. Prolonged study of hive-life in winter will reveal one hitherto unsuspected fact. At this time, far from settling down into a life of sleepy inactivity, the queen-bee seems to develop a restlessness and impatience not to be observed in her at any other season. It is clear that the workers would lie quiet enough, if they had only themselves to consider. They collect in a dense mass between the central combs of the hive, the outer members of the company just keeping in touch with the nearest honey-cells. These cells are broached by the furthermost bees, and the food is distributed from tongue to tongue. As the nearest store-cells are emptied, the whole concourse moves on, the compacted crowd of bees thus journeying over the comb at a pace which is steady yet inconceivably slow.
But this policy seems in no way to commend itself to the queen. Whenever you look into the hive, even on the coldest winter’s day, she is generally alert and stirring, keeping the worker-bees about her in a constant state of wakefulness and care. Though she has long since ceased to lay, she is always prying about the comb, looking apparently for empty cells wherein to lay eggs, after her summer habit. Night or day, she seems always in this unresting state of mind, and the work of getting their queen through the winter season is evidently a continual source of worry to the members of the colony. Altogether, the most logical inference to be drawn from any prolonged and careful investigation of hive-life in winter is that the queen-bee herself is the main obstacle to any system of hibernation being adopted in the hive. This lying-by for the cold weather, however desirable and practicable it may be for the great army of workers, is obviously dead against the natural instincts of the queen. And since, being awake, she must be incessantly watched and fed and cared for, it follows that the whole colony must wake with her, or at least as many as are necessary to keep her nourished and preserved from harm.
The Queen a Slave to Tradition
Those, however, who are familiar with the resourceful nature of the honey-bee might expect her to effect an ingenious compromise in these as in all other circumstances; and the facts seem to point to such a compromise. It is not easy to be sure of anything when watching the winter cluster in a hive, for the bees lie so close that inspection becomes at times almost futile. But one thing at least is certain. The brood-combs between which the cluster forms are not merely covered by bees. Into every cell in the comb some bee has crept, head first, and lies there quite motionless. This attitude is also common at other times of the year, and there is little doubt that the tired worker-bees do rest, and probably sleep, thus, whenever an empty cell is available. But now almost the entire range of brood-cells is filled with resting bees, like sailors asleep in the bunks of a forecastle; and it is not unreasonable to suppose that each unit in the cluster alternately watches with the queen, or takes her “watch below” in the comb-cells.
That there should be in this matter of wintering so sharp a divergence between the instincts of the queen-mother and her children is in no way surprising, when we recollect how entirely they differ on almost all other points. How this fundamental difference has come about in the course of ages of bee-life is too long a story for these pages. It has been fully dealt with in an earlier volume by the same writer—“The Lore of the Honey-Bee”—and to this the reader is referred. But the fact is pretty generally admitted that, while the little worker-bee is a creature specially evolved to suit a unique environment, the mother-bee remains practically identical with the mother-bees of untold ages back. She retains many of the instincts of the race as it existed under tropic conditions, when there was no alternation of hot and cold seasons; and hence her complete inability to understand, and consequent rebellion against the needs of modern times.
The Future Evolution of the Hive
Whether the worker-bees will ever teach her to conform to the changed conditions is an interesting problem. We know how they have “improved” life in the hive—how a matriarchal system of government has been established there, the duty of motherhood relegated to one in the thirty thousand or so, and how the males are suffered to live only so long as their procreative powers are useful to the community. It is little likely that the omnipotent worker-bee will stop here. Failing the eventual production of a queen-bee who can be put to sleep for the winter, they may devise means of getting rid of her in the same way as they disburden themselves of the drones. In some future age the mother-bee may be ruthlessly slaughtered at the end of each season, another queen being raised when breeding-time again comes round. Then, no doubt, honey-bees would hibernate, as do so many other creatures of the wilds; and the necessity for all that frantic labour throughout the summer days be obviated.
This is by no means so fantastic a notion as it appears. Ingenious as is the worker-bee, there is one thing that the mere man-scientist of to-day could teach her. At present, her system of queen-production is to construct a very large cell, four or five times as large as that in which the common worker is raised. Into this cell, at an early stage in its construction, the old queen is induced to deposit an egg; or the workers themselves may furnish it with an egg previously laid elsewhere; or again—as sometimes happens—the large cell may be erected over the site of an ordinary worker-cell already containing a fertile ovum. This egg in no way differs from that producing the common, undersized, sex-atrophied worker-bee; but by dint of super-feeding on a specially rich diet, and unlimited space wherein to develop, the young grub eventually grows into a queen-bee, with all the queen’s extraordinary attributes. A queen may be, and often is, raised by the workers from a grub instead of an egg. The grub is enclosed in, or possibly in some cases transferred to, the queen-cell; and, providing it is not more than three days old, this grub will also become a fully developed queen-bee.
Hibernation, and no Honey
But, thus far in the history of bee-life, it has been impossible for a hive to re-queen itself unless a newly-laid egg, or very young larva, has been available for the purpose. Hibernation without a queen is, therefore, in the present stage of honey-bee wisdom, unattainable, because there would be neither egg nor grub to work from in the spring, when another queen-mother was needed, and the stock must inevitably perish. Here, however, the scientific bee-master could give his colonies an invaluable hint, though greatly to his own disadvantage. In the ordinary heat of the brood-chamber an egg takes about three days to hatch, but it has been ascertained that a sudden fall in temperature will often delay this process. The germ of life in all eggs is notoriously hardy; and it is conceivable that by a system of cold storage, as carefully studied and ingeniously regulated as are most other affairs of the hive, the bees might succeed in preserving eggs throughout the winter in a state of suspended, but not irresuscitable life. And if ever the honey-bee, in some future age, discovers this possibility, she will infallibly become a true hibernating insect, and join the ranks of the summer loiterers and merry-makers. But the bee-master will get no more honey.
“Books,” said the Bee-Master of Warrilow, looking round through grey wreaths of tobacco-smoke at his crowded shelves, “books seem to tell ye most things ne’ersome-matter; but when it comes to books on bees—well, ’tis somehow quite another pair o’ shoes.”
He stopped to listen to the wind, blowing great guns outside in the winter darkness. The little cottage seemed to crouch and shudder beneath the blast, and the rain drove against the lattice-windows with a sobbing, timorous note. The bee-master drew the old oak settle nearer to the fire, and sat for a moment silently watching the comfortable blaze.
“‘True as print,’” he went on, lapsing more and more into the quaint, tangy Sussex dialect, as his theme impressed him; “’twas an old saying o’ my father’s; and right enough, maybe, in his time. A’ couldn’t read, to be sure; so a’ might have been ower unsceptical. But books was too expensive in those days to put many lies into.”
He took down at random from the case on the chimney-breast about a dozen modern, paper-covered treatises on bee-keeping, and threw them, rather contemptuously, on the table.
“I’m not saying, mind ye,” he hastened to add, “that there’s a word against truth in any one of them. They’re all true enough, no doubt, for they contradict each other at every turn. ’Tis as if one man said roses was white; and another said, ‘No, you’re wrong, they’re yaller’; and a third said, ‘Y’are both wrong, they’re red.’ And when folks are in dispute in this way, because they agree, and not because they differ, there’s little hope of ever pacifying them.
“I heard tell once of a woman bee-keeper years ago, that had a good word about bees. Said she, ‘They never do anything invariably’; and she warn’t far off the truth. She knew her own sex, did wise Mrs Tupper. Now, the trouble with the book-writers on bees is that they try to make a science of something that can never rightly be a science at all. They try to add two numbers together that they don’t know, an’ that are allers changing, and are surprised if they don’t arrive at an exact total. There’s the bees, and there’s the weather: together the result will be so many pounds of honey. If the English climate went by the calendar, and the bees worked according to unchangeable rules, you might reckon out your honey-take within a spoonful, and bee-keeping would be little more than sitting in a summer-house and figuring on a slate. But with frosts in June, and August weather in February, and your honey-makers naught but a tribe of whimsy, sex-thwarted wimmin-folk, a nation of everlasting spinsters—how can bee-keeping be anything else than a kind of walking-tower in a furrin land, when every twist an’ turn o’ the way shows something cur’ous or different?”
He stopped to recharge his pipe from the earthen tobacco-jar, shaped like an old straw beehive, which had yielded solace to many a past generation of the Warrilow clan.
“’Tis just this matter of sex,” he continued, “that these book-writing bee-masters seem to leave altogether out of their reckoning. And yet it lies well to the heart of the whole business. In an average prosperous hive there are about thirty thousand of these little stunted, quick-witted worker-bees, not one of which but could have grown into a fully-developed mother-bee, twice the size, and laying her thousands of eggs a day, if only her early bringings-up had been different. But nature has doomed her to be an old maid from her very cradle, although she is born with all the instincts and capabilities for motherhood that you wonder at in a fully grown, prolific queen. And yet the bee-masters expect her to accept her fate without a murmur; to live and work to-day just as she did yesterday and the day before; to tend and feed patiently the young bees that she has been denied all part in producing; to support a lot of lazy drones in luxury and idleness; and generally to act like a reasonable, contented, happy creature all the way through.”
He took three or four long, contemplative pulls at his Broseley clay, then came back to his subject and his dialect together.
“’Tis no wonder,” said he “that the little worker-bee gets crotchety time an’ again. Wimmin-creeturs is all of much the same kidney, whether ’tis bees or humans. Their natur’ is not to look ahead, but just to do the next thing. They sees sideways mostly, like a horse with an eye-shade but no blinkers. But now and then they ups and looks straight afore ’em, and then ’tis trouble brewing fer masters o’ all kinds, whether in hives or homes o’ men. Lot’s wife, she were a kind o’ bee-woman; and so were Eve. I’d ha’ been glad to ha’ knowed ’em both, bless ’em! The world ’ud be all the sweeter fer a few more like they. Harm done through being too much of a woman-creetur is never all harm in the long run, depend on’t.”
With his great sunburnt hand he stirred the flimsy, dog-eared pamphlets about thoughtfully, as a man will stir leaves with a stick.
“Now, ’tis just this way with bees,” he went on. “If you study how to keep ’em busy, with plain, right-down necessity hard at their heels, all goes well. The bees have no time for anything but work. As the supers fill with honey you take them off and put empty ones in their place. The queen below fills comb after comb with eggs, and you make the brood-nest larger and larger. There is allers more room everywhere, dropped down from the skies, like; no matter how fast the stock increases, nor how much the bees bring in. Just their plain day’s work is enough, and more’n enough, for the best of them. And so the summer heat goes by; the honey harvest is ended; and the bees have had no chance to dwell upon, and grow rebellious over, the wise wrong that nature has done their sex. In bee-life ’tis always evil that’s wrought, not by want o’ thought, but by too much of it. Bad beemanship is just giving bees time to think.”
“Many’s the time,” continued the bee-master, thrusting the bowl of his empty pipe into the heart of the wood-embers for lustration, and taking a clean one down for immediate use from the rack over his head; “many’s the time an’ oft it has come ower me that perhaps bees warn’t allers as we see them now. Maybe, way back in the times when England was a tropic country, tens of thousands o’ years ago, there was no call for them to live packed together in one dark chamber, as they do to-day. If the year was warm all the twelve months through, and flowers allers blooming, there ’ud be no need fer a winter-larder, nor fer any hives at all. Like as not each woman-bee lived by herself then, in some dry nook or other; made her little nest of comb, and brought up her own children, happy and comfortable. Maybe, even—and I can well believe it of her, knowing her natur’ as I do—she kept a gurt, buzzing, blusterous drone about the place an’ let him eat and drink in idleness while she did all the work, willing enough, for the two. Then, as the world slowly cooled down through the centuries, there came a short time in each year when the flowers ceased to bloom, and the bees found they had to put by a store of honey, to last till the heat and the blossoms showed up again. And there was another thing they must have found out when the cold spell was over the earth. Bees that kept apart by themselves died of cold, but those that huddled together in crowds lived warm enough throughout the winter. The more there were of ’em the warmer they kept, and the less food they needed. And so, as the winters got longer and colder, the bee-colonies increased, until at last, from force of habit, they took to keeping together all the year round. So you see, like as not, ’tis experience as has brought ’em to build their cities of to-day, just as experience, or the One ye never mention, has put the same thing into the hearts o’ men.”
A sudden flaw of wind struck the little cottage with a sound like thunder, and made the cut-glass lustres on the mantle tinkle and glitter in the yellow candle-glow. The old bee-man stopped, with his pipe half-way to his mouth, nodded gravely towards the window, in a kind of obeisance to the elements, and then resumed his theme.
“But there’s a many things about bees,” he said, “that no man ’ull come to the rights of, until all airthly things is made clear in the Day o’ Days. The great trouble and hindrance to bee-keeping is the swarm, and a good bee-master nowadays tries all he can to circumvent it. But the old habit comes back again and again, and often with stocks of bees that haven’t had a fit o’ it for years. Now, did ye ever think what swarming must have been in the beginning?”
He suddenly levelled the pipe-stem straight at my head.
“Well, ’tis all speckilation, but here’s my idee o’ it, for what ’tis worth. Take the wapses: they’re thousands of years behind the honey-bee in development, and so they give ye a look, so to speak, into the past. The end of a wapse-colony comes when the females are ready in November; and hundreds of them go off to hide for the winter, each in some hole or crevice, until, in the warm spring days, each comes out to start a new and separate home. Well, perhaps the honey-bees did much the same thing long ago, when they were all mother-bees, in the time when the world was young. And perhaps the swarm-fever in a hive to-day is naught but a kind o’ memory of this, still working, though its main use is gone. The books here will tell ye o’ many other things brought about by swarming, right an’ good enough with the old-fashioned hives. Yet that gainsays nothing. Nature allers works double an’ treble handed in all her dealings. Her every stroke tells far and wide, like the thousand ripples you make when you pitch a stone in a pond.”
There never comes, in early April, that first bright hot day which means the beginning of outdoor work on the bee-farm, but I fall to thinking of old times with a great longing to have them back again.
Modern beemanship, at least to the wide-awake folk in the craft, brings in gold pieces now where formerly one had much ado to make shillings. But profit cannot always be reckoned in money. The old mysteries and the old delusions were a sort of capital that paid cent per cent if you only humoured them aright. Bee-men, who flourished when there was a young queen upon the throne, wore their ignorance as the parson his silk and lawn. It was something that set them apart and above their neighbours. All that the bees did was put to their credit, just for the trouble of a wise wag of the head and a little timely reticence. The organ-blower worked in full view of the congregation, while the player sat invisibly within, so the blower, after the common trend of earthly affairs, got all the glory for the tune.
There are no mysteries now in honey-craft. Science has dragooned the fairies out of sight and hearing as a man treads out sparks in the whin. But, though the mysteries have gone, the old music of the hives is still here as sweet as ever. This morning, when the sun was but an hour over the hilltop, I rose from my bed, and, coming down the creaking stair through the silence and half-darkness, threw the heavy old house-door back. At once the level sunshine and the song of bees and birds came pouring in together. There was the loud humming of bees in the leafing honeysuckle of the porch, and the soft low note of the hives beyond. In its plan to-day Warrilow Bee-farm reveals the whole story of its growth from times long gone to the present. All the hives near the cottage are old-fashioned skeps of straw, covered in with three sticks and a hackle. A little way down the slope the ancient bee-boxes begin, eight-sided Stewartons mostly, with the green veneer of decades upon some of them. Beyond these stand the first rack-frame hives that ever came to Warrilow; and thence, stretching away down the sunny hillside in long trim rows, are the modern frame-bar hives, spick and span in their new Joseph’s coats of paint, with the gillyflowers driving golden shafts between them, until they reach the line of sheds—comb and honey-stores, extracting-house, and workshops—marking the distant lane-side.
The Water-carriers
As I stood in the doorway, caught by the mesmeric sheen of the light and the beauty of the morning, the humming of the bees overhead grew louder and louder. There were no flowers as yet to attract them, but in early April the dense canopy of honeysuckle here is always besieged with bees, directly the sun has warmed the clinging dewdrops. These were the water-carriers from the hives. Water at this time is one of the main necessities of bee-life. With it the workers are able to reduce the thick honey and the dry pollen to the right consistency for consumption, and can then generate the bee-milk with which the young larvæ are fed. Later on in the day the water-fetchers will crowd in hundreds to the oozy pond-side down in the valley—every bee-garden has its ancestral drinking-place invariably resorted to year after year. But thus early the pond-water is too cold for safe transport by so chilly a mortal as the little worker-bee; so Nature warms a temporary supply for her here where the dew trembles like drops of molten rainbow at the tip of each woodbine leaf.
I drank myself a deep draught from the well that goes down a sheer sixty feet into the virgin chalk of the hillside, and fell to loitering through the garden ways. Though it was so early, the little oil-engine down below in the hive-making shed was already coughing shrilly through its vent-pipe, and the saw thrumming. Here and there among the hives my men stooped at their work. The pony was harnessing to the cart, and would soon be plodding the three-mile-long road to the station with the day’s deliveries of honey. By all laws of duty I should be down there, taking my row of hives with the rest—master and men side by side like a string of turnip-hoers—busy at the spring examination which, as all bee-men know, is the most important work of the year. But the very thought of opening hives, now in the first warm break of April weather or at any time, filled me with a strange loathing. So it never used to be, never could be, in the old days whose memory always comes flooding back to me at this season with such a clear call and such a hindrance to progress and duty. Then I had as little dreamed of opening a hive as opening a vein. I should have done no more than I was doing now—passing from one old straw skep to another through the sweet vernal sunshine, my boots scattering the dew from the grass as I went, and looking for signs that tell the bee-man nearly all he really needs to know. I shut my ears to the throaty song of the engine. I heard the cart drive away without a thought of scanning its load. I got me down in a little nook of red currant flowers under the wall, where the old straw hives were thickest, and gave myself up to idle dreams, dreams of the bees and bee-men of long ago.
I should be splitting elder, thought I; splitting the long, straight wands to make feeding-troughs. I called to mind doing it, here on this self-same bench near upon fifty years ago, with my father, the woodman, sitting at my elbow learning me. We split the wands clean and true, scooped out the pith from each half, and dammed up its ends with clay. Then, with a handful of these crescent troughs and a can of syrup, we went the round of the garden together looking for stocks that were short of stores. When we found one, we pushed the hollow slip of elder gently into the hive-entrance as far as it would go, and filled it with syrup, filling it again and again throughout the day as the bees within drank it dry.
The Old Style and the New
A queer figure my father cut in his short grey smock and his long lean bent legs encased in leathern gaiters, legs between which, when I was little, and trotting after him, I had always a fine view of the sky. He was never at fault in his estimate of a hive’s prosperity. The rich clear song and steady traffic of a well-to-do bee-nation he knew at once from the anxious note and frantic coming and going of a starvation-threatened hive. It was the tune that told him. Nowadays we just rip the coverings from a hive and, lifting the combs out one by one, judge by sheer brute-force of eyesight whether there be need or plenty. “One-thirty-two!”—from my sunny seat under the pink currant blossom I can hear the call of the foreman to the booking ’prentice down in the bee-farm—“One-thirty-two—six frames covered—no moth—medium light—brood over three—mark R.Q.” R.Q. means that the stock is to be re-queened at the earliest opportunity. She has been a famous queen in her time—One-thirty-two. This would have been her fourth year, had she kept up her fertility. But “brood over three”—that is to say, only three combs with young bees maturing in them—is not good enough for progressive, up-to-date Warrilow in April, and she must be pinched at last. In the common course, I never let a queen remain at the head of affairs after her second season. Nine out of ten of them break down under the wear and stress of two summers, and fall to useless drone-breeding in the third.
Already the sun has climbed high, and yet I linger, though I know I should be gone an hour ago. The darkness, far away as it seems, will not find all done that should be done on the bee-farm, toil as hard as we may. For these sudden hot days in spring often come singly, and every moment of them is precious. To-morrow the north wind may be keening under an iron-grey sky, and pallid wreaths of snow-flakes weighing down the almond-blossom. So it happened only a year ago, when on the twenty-fifth of April I must clear away the snow from the entrance-boards of the hives. It is, I think, the unending round of business—the itch that is on us now of finding a day’s work for every day in the year in modern beecraft—which has had most to do with the changed times. The old leisure, as well as the old colour and mystery, has gone out of bee-keeping. Between burning-time in August and swarming-time in May there used to be little else for the bee-master to do but smoke his pipe and ruminate and watch the wax flowing into the hives. For we all believed that the little pellets of many-tinted pollen which the bees constantly carry in on their thighs were not food for the grubs in the cells, but wax for the comb-building. I could believe it now, indeed, if I might only sit here long enough; but the busy voices are calling, calling, and I must be gone.
Among the innumerable scraps of more or less erroneous information on hive-life, dished up by the popular newspapers in course of the year’s round, there is occasionally one which is sure to grip the curious reader’s attention. No one expects nowadays to read of the honey-bee without being set agape at the marvellous; but, really, when he is gravely told that the nurse-bees in a hive actually give the breast to their young, suckling them with a secreted liquid which is nothing more or less than milk, the ordinarily faithful newspaper student is entitled to be for once incredulous.
The thing, however, in spite of its grotesque improbability, comes nearer to the plain truth than many another item of bee-life more often encountered and unquestionably accepted. There are veritable nurse-bees in a hive, and these do produce something not unlike milk. In about three days after the egg has been deposited in the comb-cell by the queen, or mother-bee, a tiny white grub emerges. The feeding of this grub is immediately commenced by the bees in charge of the nursery quarters of the hive, and there is administered to it a glistening white substance closely resembling thick cream.
Analysts tell us that this bee-milk, as it is called, is highly nitrogenous in character, and that it has a decidedly acid reaction. It is obviously produced from the mouths of the nurse-bees, and appears to be digested matter thrown up from some part of the bee’s internal system, and combined with the secretions from one or more of the four separate sets of glands which open into different parts of the worker-bee’s mouth. The power to secrete this bee-milk seems to be normally limited to those workers who are under fourteen or fifteen days old. After that time the bee runs dry, her nursing work is relinquished, and she goes out to forage for nectar and pollen, never, as far as is known, resuming the task of feeding the young grubs. But if the faculty is not exercised, it may be held in abeyance for months together. This takes place at the close of each year, when we know that the last bees born to the hive in autumn are those who supply the milk for the first batches of larva raised in the ensuing spring.
It is difficult to keep out the wonder-weaving mood when writing of any phase of hive-life, and especially so when we have this bee-milk under consideration. For all recent studies of the matter tend to prove several facts about it not merely wonderful, but verging on the mysterious.
In the first place, its composition seems to be variable at the will of the bees. The white liquid is supplied to the grubs of worker, queen, and drone, and not only is its nature different with each, but it is even possible that this may be farther modified in the various stages of their development. It is well ascertained that the physical and temperamental differences between queen and worker-bee, widely marked as they appear, are entirely due to treatment and feeding during the larval stage. That the eggs producing the two are identical is proved by the fact that these can be transposed without confounding the original purpose of the hive. The queen-egg placed in the worker-cell develops into a common worker, while the worker-egg, when exalted to a queen’s cradle, infallibly produces a fully accoutred queen bee. The experiment can also be made even with the young grubs, provided that these are no more than three days old, and the same result ensues.
A close study of the food administered to bees when in the larval stage of their career is specially interesting, because it gives us the key to many otherwise inexplicable matters connected with hive-life. We do not know, and probably never shall know, how mere variation in diet causes certain organs to appear and certain other bodily parts to absent themselves. If the difference between queen and worker-bee were simply one of development, the worker being only an undersized, semi-atrophied specimen of a queen, there would be little mystery about it. But each has several highly specialised organs, of which the other has no trace, just as each has certain functions reduced to mere rudimentary uselessness, which, in the other, possess enormous development and a corresponding importance.
Clearly the food given in each case has peculiar properties, bringing about certain definite invariable results. We are able, therefore, to say positively that most of the classic marvels of bee-life are built up on this one determined issue, this one logical adjustment of cause and effect. The hive creates thousands of sexless workers and only one fertile mother-bee. It limits the number of its offspring according to the visible food supplies or the needs of the commonwealth. It brings into existence, when necessity calls for them, hundreds of male bees or drones, and when their period of usefulness is over it decrees their extermination. When the queen’s fecundity declines, it raises another queen to take her place. It can even, under certain rare conditions of adversity, manufacture what is known as a fertile worker, when some mischance has deprived it of its mother-bee and the materials for providing a legitimate successor to her are not forthcoming. And all these results are primarily brought about by the one means, the one vehicle of mystery—this wonderful bee-milk playing its part at all stages in the honey-bee’s life from her cradle to her grave.
For to track down this subtly-compounded elixir through all its various uses one must take a survey of almost the whole round of activities in the hive. The food of the young larva, whether of queen or worker, for the first three days after the eggs are hatched, seems to consist entirely of bee-milk. The drone-grub gets an extra day of this richly nitrogenous diet. And for the remaining two days of the grub stage of the bee’s life milk is given continuously, but, in the case of the worker and drone, in greatly diminished supply. Its place during these two days is largely taken, it is said, by p. 206honey and digested pollen in the worker’s instance, and by honey and raw pollen for the males.
The queen-grub alone receives bee-milk, of a specially rich kind and in unlimited quantity, for the whole of her larval life. This “royal jelly,” as the old bee-masters termed it, is literally poured into the capacious queen-cell. For the whole five days of her existence as a larva she actually bathes in it up to the eyes. But, as far as is known, she receives no other food during this time. The regular order of her development, and of that of the worker-bee, during the five days of the grub stage has been carefully studied, and it is curious to note that the very time when the queen’s special organs of motherhood begin to show themselves coincides exactly with the moment at which the worker-grub’s allowance of bee-milk is cut down and other food substituted.
This, no doubt, explains why these organs in the adult worker-bee are so elementary as to be practically non-existent, and accounts for the queen’s generous growth in other directions. But it leaves us completely in the dark as to the reason for the worker’s subsequent elaboration of such organs as the pollen-carrying device, the so-called wax-pincers, and the wax-secreting glands, of which the queen possesses none. Nor are we able to see how the giving or withholding of the bee-milk should furnish the queen with a long curved sting and the worker with a short straight one; nor how mere manipulation of diet can result in making the two so dissimilar in temperament and mental attributes—the worker laborious, sociable, almost preternaturally alert of mind, and withal essentiallya creature of the open air and sunshine; the queen dull of intelligence, possessed of a jealous hatred of her peers, for whom all the light and colour and fragrance of a summer’s morning have no allurements, a being whose every instinct keeps her, from year’s end to year’s end, pent in the crowded tropic gloom of the hive.
But the bee-milk as well as being the main ingredient in the larval food, has other and almost equally important uses. It is supplied by the workers to the adult queen and drones throughout nearly the whole of their lives, and forms an indispensable part of their daily diet. And this gives us a clue in our attempt to understand, not only how the population of the hive is regulated, but why the males are so easily disposed of when the annual drone-massacre sets in. By giving or depriving her of the bee-milk, the workers can either stimulate the queen to an enormous daily output of eggs or reduce her fertility to a bare minimum; and, as for the drones, it is starvation that is the secret of their half-hearted, feeble resistance to fate.
Yet though we may recount these things, and speak of this mysterious essence called bee-milk as really the mainspring of all effort and achievement within the hive, it is doubtful whether we have solved the greatest mystery of all about it. Of what is it composed, and whence is it derived? The generally-accepted explanation of its origin is that it is pollen-chyle regurgitated from the second stomach of the bee, combined with the secretions from certain glands of the mouth in passing. But the most careful dissections have never revealed anything like bee-milk in any part of the bee’s internal system. Its pure white, opaque quality has absolutely no counterpart there: nor, indeed—if we are to believe latest investigations—does pollen-chyle exist at all in either the first or second stomach of the bee, whence alone it could be regurgitated. Bee-milk, it would seem, is still a physiological mystery, and so may remain to the end of time.