CHAPTER X. A Romance of Anatomy

A ROMANCE OF ANATOMY

THE modern commercial bee-keeper—the man who keeps his bees in hives of the most approved construction, all alike in colour and shape, and all in straight rows—is too prone to look only on the practical side of his work, and to regard with a certain ill-concealed contempt anything that does not directly promote what is, in his view, the one and only object of apiculture, that of honey-getting.

But with the bee-keeper who is also a bee-lover, the tendency is all the other way. To live in the very spirit of wonder, as he must who has once dipped down below the surface of hive-life, is to saddle but a slow, ambling jade for the race in material prosperity. In a bee-garden the habit of rumination comes on one like creeping paralysis, gradually but irresistibly. It is one thing, on a fine June morning, to start away from the house, pipe in mouth and busily trundling the honey-barrow, intent on a long day’s work among the hives; it is quite another thing to keep industriously to the task hour after hour, when the sun has fixed his slothful golden grip upon you, and the drowsy song of the bees has worked its will on heart and mind.

Good resolutions have a way of petering out, reasonably enough, under these inviting circumstances. The honey-barrow makes the most comfortable seat in the world, and can be pulled up just where the shade of the linden-trees is thickest. Moreover, the blue smoke of tobacco, drifting lazily up through the sunshine, adds just that touch of deliberation needed in a scene where all is unmitigated, almost desperate toil; while what difference can it make if one alone be idle in the hundred thousand? And so, as often as not, the creaking wheel comes permanently to rest under the lindens; the honey is left to the honey-makers; the thoughts follow the bees into their hives, or may-be wend away over seas to the great plantations, where the dry weed filling the pipe-bowl was once a green leaf in an ocean of green, flecked over with blossom, and sung over by bees, whose ancestors might have come from this very nook in old England, where it is now all ending in smoke and quiet thought.

But, especially on rainy days, when there is much to do indoors—preparing the section-racks, discharging the honey from the full combs that, empty, they may be returned to the hives for refilling on the morrow, and what not—the tendency to set aside obvious, humdrum duties in beemanship has a still more capable ally.

The beeman with a microscope has given the seven-leagued boots to his conscience; he will never catch up with it again in a whole life’s march. If the daily work in the hive, as seen with the naked eye, is a fascinating, duty-dispersing study, a microscopic acquaintance with the hive-worker herself, and the details of her extraordinary equipment, lets one into a whole new world of fact and thought.

It is only under a strong glass that the true place of the honey-bee in the scale of creation can be entirely estimated. Her work is evident to the most casual eye, but of the worker herself we get only a vague idea of a dim-hued, crystal-winged atom running a perpetual race with the wind and sunshine, or forming an all but undistinguishable speck in the seething, heaving multitudes within the hive.

But here, on the stage of the microscope, the honey-bee is revealed as a totally new creature; and, by little and little, a story unfolds itself about her which, in its way, is a perfect epic of life. No one can study the perplexities of hive-life for long without a conviction that a creature executing such varied and elaborate works must, of necessity, be herself highly developed in body and mind. But it seldom happens, even with the veriest tiro, that the expectation comes anywhere near the reality in such an examination of the common worker-bee. The unaided eye sees a creature, fashioned simply enough to all appearances—a brown, attenuated body, two pairs of wings, the usual six legs common to all insects, and a couple of bent horns, like threshels, that continuously waver to and fro. But under the glass this simplicity at once vanishes. From the tip of her antennæ to the barbed end of her sting, there is nothing about the honey-bee that is not made on the most bewilderingly, complicated plan.

Watching a hive at work on a busy day in summer, the attention is first drawn to the pollen-gatherers, labouring in by the thousand with the big, oval, brightly-coloured masses fixed to their hindmost legs; and it is first to the pollen-carrying organism that the glass is now naturally directed. The six legs, which looked all very much alike to the naked eye, are seen to be in three pairs, and the construction of each pair differs very markedly from that of its fellows. So far from their being simple legs, each has no fewer than nine jointed parts, and nearly every part carries a special piece of mechanism necessary and vital in the daily work of the bee. Whole treatises might be written on the functions of the human hand, yet the hand is a very simple contrivance compared with the legs of the honey-bee. The pollen-carrying device is on the thigh of the hind leg. The thigh is broadened out and hollowed, and round this oblong cavity is a fringe of incurving bristles which look as if they would hold anything. But before the pollen can be packed in these baskets it must be collected and kneaded together. Practically the whole body of the bee is used in pollen-gathering. Under the low power of the microscope it is seen that hardly any part of the trunk or limb is without its dense covering of hairs; but with the high objective these hairs cease to be hairs, and are changed into actual feathers, delicate herring-bone implements, which sweep up the pollen as the bee dives into the flower-cup for the nectar that lies below.

Nearly every joint of each leg is furnished with a comb of bristles, with which this pollen-dust is scraped off and transferred to the carrying-basket after being moistened by the tongue; while the hind-legs have each a complete, perfectly-fashioned curry-comb. Here the leg is widened and flattened, and covered on one side with nine or ten rows of short, strong spines, with which the bee scrapes her body just as a groom curry-combs a horse. At ordinary times she will carefully pack her load of pollen into its proper receptacles before returning to the hive, so that it shall be all ready for transference to the cells. At the cell-mouth she pushes each lump off by means of her other legs, leaving it to be rammed down into the cell by the store-keepers. No distinction is made here, every kind and colour of pollen being indiscriminately stored in the same cell; and when the cell is full, a thin layer of honey is smeared over all, to preserve it from the air. When, however, time presses, the bee will not stop to knead up the load, but will carry it home as it is, arriving in the hive smothered completely from head to foot as with gold-dust. Then the house-bees gather round her, soon scraping her free of her encumbrance, and she starts off again for another load.

The fact that insects can walk on both upper and under surfaces apparently with equal ease, is none the less remarkable because we see it going on every day of our lives. Yet the fly, crawling up the window-glass, or running about on the ceiling, owes his power of topsy-turvy perambulation to a very ingenious device. This is well illustrated in the foot of a bee. She has a pair of short, strong double claws, which will take her securely over all but the smoothest and shiniest surfaces; and it is with these claws that bees form themselves into dense clusters and knots and cables within the hive, holding hand-to-hand, as it were, in all directions. But when there is nothing for the claw to hold by, another part of the foot comes into play. This is a soft, flexible pad, which is always covered by a thick, oily exudation. In walking, the bee puts her feet down three at a time, the pads adhering instantly they come into contact with the smooth surface. At the next step the other three pads come into play, while the first three are stripped off. But each foot is capable of attaching and detaching itself independently of its fellows. In this case the stripping is accomplished by downward pressure of the claws of the same foot.

On each of her fore-legs the bee has an appliance which fulfils a very important office. It is a semicircular notch with a fringe of strong hairs, and when the leg is bent up, this notch engages with a curious projection on the next upper joint, forming an eyelet roughly circular in shape. With this exact and special tool she cleans her antennæ, and this is done at short intervals throughout the whole active time of her life, much as, in the operation of winking, the human eye is kept cleansed. The tongue also is freed from adhering grains of pollen by this device.

The question, How does a bee gather the flower-juices to make her honey? is met by certain popular naturalists with the assurance that she sucks them through a tube. This is so easy a generalisation that it amounts very nearly to positive error. The tongue of the bee is not a tube, as the word is usually understood. And she laps up the nectar as often as she sucks it. It depends entirely on the quantity to be dealt with; and a little careful dissection of the mouth-parts of the bee, by means of the microscope and a pair of long needles, will soon make the whole matter clear.

She is no beauty—the honey-bee, seen at such close quarters; unending toil, and a perverted, baffled nature, do not tend to loveliness in any of her sex. But her positive and almost terrifying ugliness, when looked at so disadvantageously, is soon forgotten as one comes to realise her abounding possession of that other kind of beauty—the beauty of utility.

To the naked eye her tongue is a bright brown, shining piece, protruding from her mouth, and hanging down with much the same appearance as an elephant’s trunk. Under the microscope it is soon seen that this is not a tongue in the proper sense, but a continuation of the under-lip. It consists of six or seven different parts capable of being fitted together lengthways. There is a central part, longer than the rest, with a hairy spatula at its end, and when the other parts are closed about this, the whole virtually forms a tube within a tube. The spatula does the lapping when only minute quantities of fluid have to be taken up, and these pass into the mouth more by capillary attraction than by actual sucking; but when there is a brimming cup of nectar to be emptied, the whole mechanism of the tongue is brought into play. The longitudinal strips are placed together edge to edge, and the liquid is drawn out of the flower-cup by the action of the tongue-muscles in much the same way as water is lifted by a pump.

Now that we have the head of the bee under observation, many curious things about it can be ascertained. The strong, curved jaws, working sideways, are doubly interesting as the main implements used in the preparation of the wax, and largely in the comb-building. But the eyes and the long, flail-like antenna rivet attention first. Whether the bee was made for her life, or the life—imposed on her by inexorable conditions—made the bee what she is to-day, the extraordinary adaptation of her physique to her environment is beyond all question. The great compound eyes, with their thousands of facets each pointing in a slightly different direction, are obviously made for wide and distant outlooks. It is with these eyes that the bee finds her way out and home over miles of country. In the worker the compound eyes occupy the whole sides of the head, but in the drone they are much larger, and meet entirely at the top. Thus, dallying in the sunshine, he is able the while to keep the whole arc of the sky under scrutiny, ready at an instant’s notice to take up the love-challenge of the young queens.

But these large multiple eyes of the bee are of little use to her at close quarters, or in the deep twilight of the hive. For indoor use, and for near vision, she has three other eyes, containing a single lens each, and set in her forehead just above her antennæ. The popular belief, that the honey-bee carries on her busy life, and elaborate enterprises in complete darkness, is mainly a fallacy. Probably there is always some light, even in the remotest recesses of the hive—enough, at least, for the eyes of the bee, if not for our own vision.

The bee, however, would seem to depend very little on sight alone in the prosecution of her various tasks. There is little doubt that she possesses all the other four senses in a marked degree. Both the tongue and the lips have certain highly developed structures upon them which can be nothing else than organs of taste; while the most superficial acquaintance with the life of the hive must convince anyone that the bee possesses the senses of smell and hearing, and that very acutely. Where the seat of these two faculties lies is at present doubtful, and the exact functions of the antennæ are still a matter of conjecture. But it is at least certain that these latter perform vital office in every act or enterprise of the bee. It is obvious that the antennæ are very delicate organs of touch, but it is equally obvious that they are much more than this. It has been ascertained that they carry no less than six totally different kinds of instruments, each of which must have its distinct use.

Observation of the ways of the honey-bee has been carried on for thousands of years. More books have been written about the bee than perhaps of all other creatures put together. And yet our knowledge of her powers and organisation must still be reckoned in its infancy. The microscopists have dissected her antenna and isolated all their various parts, but of the particular functions of these little or nothing is known at present. There are certain hairs, evenly distributed over the whole surface, which are presumably instruments of touch. But there are other hairs, or fine cones, which are hollow, enclosing a delicate nerve-fibre; hairs set loosely in a cavity; hairs curved and ringed, and of different lengths. Then there are mysterious pits and depressions, either open or covered with incredibly thin membranes, enshrining nerve-ends only just visible with the highest objectives. And the whole is linked up in an intricate nervous system that baffles every art and patience of research; while, when all has been investigated and described, no one is really any the wiser.

The antenna are certainly touch-organs, and, in all likelihood, it is by their means that the bee hears and smells. Yet this only exhausts a few of their manifest possibilities. It is quite clear that we must admit the honey-bee to possess other senses than the five we know of; and—for a guess—some of these mysterious implements on her antenna may be thought-transmitters and -receivers on the wireless plan. The wonderful unanimity of action among bees may be due to the fact that they can exchange ideas through the air, as men have now at last come to do. The faculty of speech, hitherto held up as man’s insignia of lordship over the rest of creation, may be indeed a crude, archaic thing, compared with the mind-language of the honey-bees.

There is another conceivable function which the antennæ of bees may perform—that of unerring and instant estimation of short distances. They may be delicate measuring instruments, not mechanically applied in the way of a foot-rule or metric scale, but registering dimensions inherently, as our ears record intensity of sound. This would go far to explain how honeycomb is built, how the cells are made all of the same shape and size, although hundreds of the mason-bees are at work on the structure, not only at the same moment, but in succession, each bee coming and going in the murmurous gloom of the hive, and beginning instantly and unhesitatingly at the point where her predecessor broke off. As the central division of the comb grew, expanding in all directions downward, and the cells were built out horizontally at the same time, the bee would know by her sense of dimension when the limit of each side in the hexagonal cell-base was reached, and would know the proper angle to turn off at in the laying of the next foundation-line.

Anyone who has watched the flight of the bee must have been struck by its sheer facility and freedom no less than by its speed. It is quite evident that the bee is not only an accomplished aërial navigator, but that she sustains and propels herself through the air with very little effort. Obviously her equipment for flight must be a thoroughly efficient one, and yet at first glance it is not quite clear how she manages so well. The student of the flight-problem, taking his ideas and conception of first principles from the flight of birds, is accustomed to believe that there are at least two vital indispensable elements in the process—a pair of wings or combination of aëroplane and propellers that will sustain as well as drive, and some sort of steering-apparatus like the bird’s tail. Yet, as far as a first general inspection carries us, the bee appears to have no rudder-mechanism at all, but to depend on her four wings for every purpose. The wings of the bird have a variable action. They can be used together or separately, and are as capable of eccentric adjustment, both in themselves and in relation to one another, as a pair of human arms. But the bee’s wings have none of this adaptability. They have but the one motion, up and down; and they work symmetrically, each wing keeping time with its fellow. Yet the bee steers herself perfectly well in a hundred different evolutions, accomplishing all that the bird attains with his more complicated apparatus for flight.

The whole problem is bound up with another problem; and the two, difficult of solution apart, easily resolve one another when taken in conjunction. Insects are so called because their bodies are in two parts, entirely divided except for an extremely slender connecting joint. We are so accustomed to accept this arrangement as a common fact in nature that we seldom stop to consider its real significance. It is not easy to see how such a construction can be anything else than a drawback to any living creature. But in the hive-bee the whole arrangement seems to amount to what must be called an ideal inconvenience, seeing that her honey-sac and complicated organs for producing the larval food are in her abdomen, with no way to them but through this fine joint. Clearly there is some weighty reason for it, out-balancing all other considerations, or it would not exist; and when we come to study it in connection with the honey-bee’s peculiar system of flight, we soon arrive at the true solution.

It has been said that the wings of the bee have a perfectly symmetrical action, and that they have a single fixed direction, moving up and down, always at right-angles with the line of the thorax. Under the microscope each of the four wings is seen as a transparent, impervious membrane, intersected with fine ribs. The front wing, however, has a much stronger and stiffer rib running the entire length of its upper edge, and it is on this main rib that almost the entire force of the flight-muscles is concentrated. If you look farther, you will see that the under wing has a row of fine hooks along its top edge, while the lower edge of the upper wing is flanged or folded back. In flight the hooks on one wing engage with the flange on the other, and thus the wings on each side are automatically locked together, forming one continuous air-resisting surface. This combined wing is very flexible throughout, except at its upper edge, where it is stiffened by the main rib. In action, therefore,—the force being applied practically to the edge alone, which resists the air while the rest of the wing bends to it—the result is that the whole wing becomes an oscillating, inclined plane, whose inclination, forward on the down-stroke, is still forward on the up-stroke, because the plane-inclination reverses itself automatically.

From this it will be understood how the flexible wings of the bee are used in straightforward flight; but, seeing that the wings themselves are incapable of independent or irregular action, it is not yet clear how the bee contrives to steer herself, rising or descending, or turning sideways, just as the mood seizes her. It is here that the reason for the peculiar construction of her body becomes plain. The fine link which unites her abdomen to her thorax is really an universal joint, actuated by a series of powerful cross-muscles, and the bee steers herself through the air by using the weight of the lower half of her body as a counterpoise. By swinging her heavy abdomen forward or backward, or from side to side, she changes her centre of gravity, and the line of force of her aëroplanes, at one and the same time. Actually her body keeps its vertical position, being her heaviest part, and it is the lighter wing-supporting thorax which is deflected. But the result is the same, and every variety and direction of flight is accomplished by the bee on what seems a far more simple plan than that evidenced in the flight of birds.

One of the most difficult things to account for in the life of the honey-bee is the fact that the temperature of the hive can be varied at the will of its occupants. The system of mechanical ventilation will, of course, explain how the hive is kept cool in the greatest heats of summer, but it does not explain the sudden accessions of heat to which it is liable from time to time. These occur principally when the wax is being generated. Under the bronze armour-plates of her body the worker-bee has six shallow, but broad depressions, beneath which the wax-glands are placed. Perfect rest and a high temperature seem to be necessary for the stimulation of these glands, and the wax-makers consume a large quantity of sweet-food during the process. It is generally stated that bees fill themselves from the stores of mature honey before uniting in the cluster; but it is more probable that the food consumed during wax-making is principally the nectar, almost as gathered from the flowers. This view is confirmed by certain experiments which were undertaken to decide the amount of food assimilated during the production of a given weight of wax. When the bees had access only to honey, it was found that five or six pounds were needed during the time that one pound of wax was produced. But if the bees were fed on a plain syrup of cane-sugar, more wax was generated. The chemical composition of fresh nectar is almost identical with that of sugar from the sugar-cane, but mature honey contains practically no cane-sugar at all. It is very doubtful, therefore, if the economic bee would deplete her hard-won stores of honey for a purpose that could be better accomplished in another and cheaper way. And it should also be borne in mind that the natural time for comb-building coincides with the season when nectar is in greatest plenty.

These sudden variations in temperature appear to be brought about by a wholesale increase in the rate of respiration among the bees; and there is nothing that excites the wonder of the student of hive-life more than the breathing-apparatus of the bee, as seen under the microscope. Practically her whole physical system is directly supplied with air, drawn in through her many spiracles. As far as scientists have been able to determine, there is not a fibre or nerve in her entire body that is not reached by the minute ramifications of the air-ducts, in direct communication with the great main breathing-vessels in the bee’s abdomen. Respiration appears to be largely voluntary with the honey-bee. She breathes only when the necessity for it arises, and will sometimes arrest the action entirely for three or four minutes together. But when the wax-making is going forward, or swarming-time is near at hand, the quick, vibratory movement of respiration is visible everywhere in the throng of bees, and the temperature of the hive climbs up often to a dozen degrees above its normal point.

The breathing system of the honey-bee is closely connected with her sound-organs. Anyone asked to describe the note made by a bee would probably say that she hums or buzzes, and there would be an end to most ideas on the matter. But to the beeman this is a pitifully inadequate statement of the truth. The bee comprises in herself not one, but a whole choir of voices, and she has a compass of at least an octave and a half. Every one of her fourteen spiracles, and each of her wings, is capable of producing sound; and these sounds can be endlessly varied in quality, intensity, and pitch. It is no exaggeration to say that the honey-bee is as accomplished a musician as any bird; but as each individual voice is for the most part lost in the general symphony of the hive, it is difficult to get a complete idea of her capabilities as a soloist.

The voice-apparatus in the spiracles is one of the most intricate things in the whole anatomy of the bee. It has a multiplicity of parts, and is obviously designed to convey a great variety of sounds. The wings also produce tones that run up or down in the scale, according to their rate of oscillation; and from them comes the sibilant note usually called buzzing. Listening to the hive-music at any season of the year, it is impossible to resist the thought that bees not only hold individual communication by means of these infinitely varied sounds, but that the general note given out by the multitude unerringly expresses the state of affairs within the hive for the time being. A prosperous stock voices its busy contentment in a way impossible to misunderstand. It is a deep, blithe, resonant sound, like the steady running of well-oiled machinery, each wheel adding its own whirring melody to the general theme. Weak or famishing colonies give out a wavering, intermittent note, the very voice of complaint and fear for the future. When a hive has lost its queen, a capable bee-master should have no difficulty in divining the trouble by listening at the hive-entrance. A queenless stock is all clamour and the hubbub of divided counsels. The ordinary rich reverberation of labour stops, and a sound of panic goes to and fro in the hive unceasingly. If a hive be quietly opened, and its queen removed with little disturbance, it may be some time before the bees discover their loss. Some colonies experimented with in this way realise their deprivation immediately, and the hue-and-cry begins at once. But one of the most curious facts in bee-life is the variation in intelligence, and alertness of perception, between the different hives. A steady-going, dull race may be a considerable time before it perceives the absence of its queen. The common note of work goes on unchanged until the fact dawns on it. And then the peculiar shrill outcry commences, overpowering all other sounds until reason again asserts itself in the colony, and the bees set about the work of raising another queen.

The voice of the drone is deeper and hoarser than that of the worker-bee, by reason of his larger body; and his noisier buzzing is explained by his greater length and breadth of wing. The queen also has a deeper, more husky voice during flight; but she has, in addition, a peculiar cry of her own, an old familiar sound to bee-keepers all the world over. It is heard principally just before the swarming of the hive. Certain old skeppists profess to be able to foretell the date on which a swarm will issue by studying the cry of the queen. On quiet nights, just before the swarming-season commences, it may frequently be heard above the general murmur of the hive by bending the ear down to the entrance. It is a shrill piping sound, repeated over and over again, and often answered by other and fainter notes. How it is produced is not certainly known, but probably it is caused by the wings or legs being sharply rubbed together, much as a cricket or grasshopper utters its cry. The louder note is made by the old queen, and there is no doubt of its import. Jealousy and the lust of battle are on her, and she is trying to get at the young princesses in their cells. The cry is one of baffled fury as she strives with the guards about the cells, and the answering notes come from the imprisoned queens who are just as eager for the fray. The old skeppists are never far out in their reckoning. When this state of affairs has begun, the crisis is imminent; and the morrow is sure to see the emigrating party setting off for its new home, carrying the old queen irresistibly with it.

It has been said that the nurse-bees, who have the entire charge and care of the young brood, feed the larvæ from their mouths with a thick white fluid, which is aptly called bee-milk. All the time the nurses are engaged on this work, they are themselves hearty eaters of both honey and pollen; so that at first sight it appears as if the bee had the power of instantaneous digestion, feeding herself at one moment, and, at the next, regurgitating this food, changed into a totally different substance, to feed the young grubs. Moreover, there is another wonderful thing regarding this bee-milk. It has been proved by careful analysis that its composition varies considerably. The male, female, and queen-larvæ are all fed with it, but its constitution differs, not only with each kind of larva, but according to the age the larva has reached. The bee must therefore have her whole system of digestion under full voluntary control. How she manages this critical part of her work can only be understood by the aid of a good microscope.

Perhaps there is nothing more wonderful, in the whole wonderful anatomy of the bee, than her digestive organism and its contributory system of glands, each of which has its special and important use. When she draws up the nectar from the flowers, it passes at once into the first of her two stomachs, which is simply and solely a reservoir. Here it can remain indefinitely at the will of the bee; or it can be thrown up and poured into the comb-cells, to be brewed into honey; or it can be allowed to pass through a valve at the base of the reservoir into the bee’s second and lower stomach, where digestion takes place and the honey and pollen are formed into chyle. But, by one of the most ingenious devices in nature, this second stomach is also capable of returning its contents to the mouth, and the chyle is there changed into bee-milk for the nourishment of the larvæ.

The worker-bee has, in all, four distinct glands, each secreting a fluid with properties different from the other three. These glands are all situated in the mouth. Two of them have a common opening in the upper side of the root of the tongue; and as the bee sucks, their combined secretions mingle with the flower juices automatically, and the first step in the change of the nectar into honey takes place. The third gland is in the roof of the mouth, and it is the secretion from this gland which acts on the regurgitated chyle, and changes it into brood-food. The fourth gland is double. These twin-glands have their openings at the base of the jaws, and the action of chewing is necessary to excite their secretion.

The valve between the upper, or honey-stomach, and the lower, or chyle-stomach, has an extensible neck, and the bee can, at will, raise this telescopic piece through the interior of the honey-sac until the valve is pressed against the opening into the gullet. Thus the contents of the lower stomach can be driven into the mouth without coming into contact with the stored sweets in the reservoir, and this pre-digested matter is always ready at an instant’s notice for the use of the larva, or for the nourishment of drones or queen.

It has been said that the nursery-work of the hive is undertaken exclusively by the young bees during the first fortnight or so of their lives. After this time they make their first foraging expedition, beginning with pollen-gathering, and relinquishing this in turn for the collection of nectar when they have arrived at full maturity. The mature workers take no part in the feeding of the larvæ, except on very rare emergencies. In relation to this, it is a curious fact that the gland in the roof of the mouth, which acts on the chyle, forming it into brood-food, is in full development only during the first weeks of the worker-bee’s career. After that its activity swiftly declines, until, in old workers, it becomes largely atrophied.

The digestive gland-system of the honey-bee, although it has been fairly well explored by the scientific naturalists, is still much of a mystery, and this especially with regard to the glands attached to the jaws. The secretion from these glands—obviously a very powerful acid—is mainly used to convert the raw wax from its hard, brittle character into the soft, ductile material of which the combs are made. It is probably used to some extent, also, in the preparation of the brood-food, in conjunction with the gland in the roof of the mouth. It mingles with the pollen when this is masticated, and no doubt it has various other uses; but no one seems as yet to have discovered why these two glands should be so enormously developed in the queen, who takes no part in the nursery-work or comb-building. The whole question will naturally have little more than a passing interest for the general reader; but, to the bee-keeper with a microscope, it takes a prominent place among the debatable things in hive-life. If the difference between the queen-bee and the worker-bee—a difference of organic structure as well as mere development—is really brought about by variation in the quality and quantity of the food supplied to the larva, then the action of these glands cannot be over-estimated in importance, and cannot be studied too deeply: they form the very spring and fount of life. Yet is it certain that the influence brought to bear on the young grubs by the nurse-bees is wholly restricted to the matter of food? The worker-bee has several curious organs and gland-systems in various parts of her body, in addition to those already enumerated, to which no rational use has yet been assigned. The more we study her extraordinary equipment, the less justification there appears to be for dogmatising about her, limiting or particularising the function of any one gland or implement in the whole unending array. The old adage, that there is nothing invariable about the honey-bee, is like to be as true with regard to her physiology as it is with her habits of life; and, for all we can tell, to-morrow’s knowledge may render obsolete much of the carefully garnered knowledge of to-day.

If the story of the honey-bee’s anatomy has everywhere some of the elements of romance about it—in its unexpected incidents, its adventurous colour, its shadow of a great design—this spirit suffers no abatement when we come, in a last view of it, to consider her as one carrying arms, one bearing such a weapon of offence as never came into human mind to fashion. The long curved scimitar of the queen, which she cherishes so carefully that nothing will induce her to strike with it except when it is to be turned against a royal foe, is otherwise little else than a harmless piece of domestic furniture. But the sting of the valorous worker-bee, seen under a microscope, is a positively terrifying engine of destruction. Popular science generally describes it as a sheath containing a barbed and poisonous dart; and the trite comparison is always made of the bee’s sting with the finest sewing-needle, the latter being likened to a rough bar of iron. The idea of a sheath is pure fiction, as a little painstaking examination will soon reveal.

The bee’s sting is made up of three separate lances, each with a barbed edge, and each capable of being thrust forward independently of the others. The central and broader lance has a hollow face, furnished at each side with a rail, or beading, which runs its whole length. On the back of each of the other two lances there is a longitudinal groove, and into these grooves fit the raised beadings of the central lancet. Thus the sting is like a sword with three blades—united, but sliding upon one another—the barbed points of which continue to advance alternately into the wound, going ever deeper and deeper of their own malice aforethought after the initial thrust is made. It is a device of war, compared to which the explosive bullet is but a clumsy brutality. Yet this is not all. To make its death-dealing powers doubly sure, this thorough-minded amazon must fill the haft of her triple blade with a subtle poison, and so contrive its sliding mechanism that the same impulse, which drives the points successively forward, drenches the whole weapon with a fatal juice.

The tendency to be unduly scientific, to meet these things with exact and unimaginative interest, receives its final quietus here. For he who realises the whole deadly efficacy of the honey-bee’s sting cannot logically pass it by as a mere remarkable provision of nature, praising God for it complacently, but must concede it a much wider significance. This complicated weapon of the stunted, sex-perverted worker-bee owes its existence as much to deliberate art as to nature, or those who watch the Omnipotent in hive-life are strangely and perversely led astray. In the queen-mother, whose physical organism may be said to be comparatively unchanged from its aboriginal type, we see the part corresponding to the worker’s sting, essentially another creation. The queen’s ovipositor is longer; it is curved; the barbs upon it are small and insignificant; the fluid in the secreting-gland is no poison at all, but a thick opaque substance, whose true use is probably to glue the eggs safely to the bottoms of the cells. She is also provided with a pair of blunt instruments covered with sensitive hairs, which serve, with the ovipositor, to guide the egg securely to its destination. The worker-bee has these feelers on either side of her sting, but she has perverted them to a very different office, that of seeking out the vulnerable parts of her enemy. And what a drastic change her will, or that of her foster-mothers, has wrought in the whole contrivance! She has bartered the privilege of motherhood and years of life for a few short months and a share in the communal sovereignty. She must be ready to further the well-being of the hive by the art of war as well as by the arts of peace. Therefore she has deliberately helped in fashioning the ploughshares into cannon. A little change in her food as a nursling, an infinitesimal leaking from a gland that takes the full power of the strongest glass to see,—and, with all the other multitudinous changes of form and character, this last miracle comes quietly into being. The egg-depositing shaft grows short and straight; its moderate indentations become cruel jagged barbs designed to hold as well as to kill; the harmless, egg-fastening gluten is quickened into a virulent poison; and the death-dealing thing is ready and ripe for service against all honey-lovers, the hereditary foes of the hive.