CHAPTER XI. The Mystery of the Swarm

THE MYSTERY OF THE SWARM

THE old “swarm in May,” beloved of ancient beemen, is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Modern hives and modern methods, although they have not as yet achieved their main intent of abolishing natural swarming altogether, yet tend to bring this extraordinary ebullition of hive-life to its fulfilment later and later in each year. Far from being a virtue, as of old, an early swarm, or indeed any swarm at all, is now accounted a misfortune, even a downright disgrace, in scientific beemanship. And yet the bees, though easy to discourage, are hard to teach. In spite of roomy hives and a watchful bee-master ready to give them an unbroken succession of young and fertile queens, and a whole houseful of new furniture at a moment’s notice, still the bees go on playing this mad game of wholesale truantry, and still the bee-keeper must stand looking hopelessly on from the midst of his elaborate appliances, while his property sings about his ears, or wings away into the upper skies, irrevocable as last year’s mill-water.

Beemen call it the swarming fever; and fever it is in very truth. The reasons for it have long ago been crystallised into exact and accepted phrases. An overcrowded condition of the hive; the desire of the bees to get rid of a failing queen; the excitement of the queen herself at the menace of coming rivals; the natural instinct of colonies to increase and multiply—anything but the one all-sufficient and obvious reason, that bees swarm because they suddenly and intensely desire it.

The story of the Sioux Indian,—won for civilisation from boyhood, over-educated and overrefined, decorated with a high college-degree and adorning a great pulpit, and then casting it all to the four winds, stripping and painting himself, and raging away with his kind on the war-trail,—has a near parallel in the behaviour of bees at swarming-time. Instinct could never be a party to such an inconsequent, outrageous, brilliantly reckless, joyous proceeding. But it is ever in the way of reason to be splendidly unreasonable at times, and here the honey-bee shows herself the true child of her origins. From a stern, self-elected destiny-maker, callously pressing to the forefront of life over all obstacles of heart and hearth, she changes back, for the nonce, into the aboriginal bee-woman, thoughtless, pleasure-loving, improvident, spending the garnered treasure of laborious days in the one mad moment’s frolic.

For it is impossible to regard the incident of the swarm as only one more link in the chain of sober, calculating bee-wisdom. It is obviously a lapse, a general falling away from the all-wise, public polity. For a single hour in her drudging, joyless, perfect life, the worker-bee battens down all the virtues, and rages forth like the Sioux Indian to swill at the stream of forbidden love and laughter, unmindful of the cost. Just when the common self-abnegation is yielding its rich first-fruits of prosperity, and the hive is overflowing with its wealth of citizens and possessions, this fever comes among them, and spreads like a prairie fire. By all laws of prudence it is now, of all times, that every child of the Mother-State should stand by her mightily, to uphold her in the high place won for her by unending toil and innumerable lives. But old ancestral memory wakens, calling irresistibly. Nature, in the beginning of time, made the honey-bee to inhabit a tropic land, where there was no need for pent, cold-withstanding houses, nor any use in laying up provender for days of dearth, because the land flowed with perpetual honey. Bee-life in those far-off ages was all dancing in the sunshine, and the bee-woman had little to do but to fly to the nearest brimming flower-cup when her nurslings wanted food, But a cooling world, the ever northward trend of her race, and then the folly of her own wisdom—intellect turning upon itself—all combined to lose for her the old slothful paradise of plenty. The drone, reasoning inversely by the wisdom of his folly, made a better compromise with fate. He held to his life of ease and his gratuitous pleasures at all cost, and let his mate go her way undeterred, blinding his eyes to the new necessities. Work and responsibility gradually soured and sharpened and hardened the one, while dependence on his womenkind as insidiously changed the other into a creature of idleness and the senses. And when he came at last to realise the outcome of it all, it was too late. The matriarchal commonwealth was established, hedged round securely with a myriad poisoned blades. To live a drone had been his heart’s desire, and now dronehood, mere seminality, was allotted to him as a retribution. The things for which man lifts his unregarded prayer all his life through, might very well prove his fittest punishment, granted to him in the Hereafter: so little can man or drone distinguish between the enduring things of life and death.

But of all intolerable fates, that must be least bearable, to have wisely willed and beautifully fashioned our own eternity; and then, being only human, or at least reasonable, to find its goodness really smooth-going, colour-fast, impregnable at all points, with never a bright break or flaw to vary the monotony of well-doing. No wonder the honey-bee swarms, breaks helter-skelter out of her prison-bounds of order, commendable toil, chill, maidenly propriety; and goes rioting away for one short hour of joyousness and madcap frolic, such as her primæval sisters looked to as the common day’s lot, when there were no hives, and motherhood was not the sole prerogative of one in thirty thousand, and when the sun burned high and cheerily in heaven from end to end of the tropic year. It is easy to be wise, and temperately scientific, in accounting for this feverish impulse of the worker-bees, allotting it a sound and circumspect part in the furtherance of the general polity. But is it not, in the main, Nature—the atrophied sexual spirit—awakening, or at least stirring a little in her age-long sleep? In the sultry August evenings the young queens of the ant-hills pour out in unnumbered thousands to meet the males, and people the ruddy sunshine with the glint of their wings. This is swarming in its truest sense. The wingless, workful, underground existence follows, but the love-flight of the ants, while it lasts, is none the less a real, intensely joyous thing. And surely the swarming-fever that so strangely and inopportunely seizes upon hive-life, is at one with it in nature and spirit, although its original purpose and value have been long ago lost in the ages.

The one in the whole multitude who alone has the full inheritance of her sex, the queen-bee, seems often at the fountain-head of the revolution. Sometimes, undoubtedly, it is she who first develops this longing, feverish unrest, and by little and little communicates it to the whole colony. Here the variability of bee-nature comes sharply into evidence. Some hives will show this restless spirit for many days before the swarm issues, while with others the great upheaval seems, as far as the mass of bees is concerned, to be a sudden unpremeditated thing occurring in the midst of the universal content and industry. The preparations for raising new queens are always taken in hand betimes, but probably this is the work of the far-seeing, sober old bees of the hive, with whom communism has become a settled and accepted calamity. The bees who will ultimately constitute the swarm may be supposed to nourish their secret desires from the first moment the queen shows signs of mutability; to neglect all their old tasks, first in heart and then in reality; and finally—when the queen’s mood has reached its culminating point, and her work in the hive is in virtual abeyance—to throw down plummet and trowel and hod, and rush forth in a wild, hilarious company, urged by a longing that they are as powerless to resist as to understand.

In the study of bee-life one comes upon many questions, but seldom answers to fit all. If the queen’s fecundation takes place only once in her life, and nature intends this to suffice for her whole fruitful period, it is not easy to see why she should go out with the swarm at all. That she is not the inveterate recluse as generally believed, and that she does occasionally make short flights in the open during her laying career, is well proved. The desire, therefore, to see the light again after a long incarceration cannot be urged as her reason for going off with the swarm. A much more plausible notion is that the sexual spirit is again roused in the queen, just as it seems to be roused for the first time in the worker-bee; and that, with all, the journey is undertaken as a mating-flight, a faint re-echo of a racial custom long extinct, bearing the closest analogy to the marriage-swarm from the ant-hill. It must be borne in mind that, although the queen-bee is undoubtedly rendered capable of producing her kind of both sexes during several years, as the result of a single fertilisation, it cannot be incontestably held that she never again meets the drone under any circumstances. There is nothing in her physical organism to prevent a second coition, although with the drone this is impossible, for more reasons than the all-sufficient one—that he dies in his marriage-hour.

In the old bee-gardens, where the “swarm in May” is still a living, present thing, it is pleasant to sit with the proprietor under the rosy shade of apple-boughs waiting for the swarms to issue, and “talking bees,” which is the most nerve-soothing, soul-refreshing occupation in the world. There never was a bee-keeper, new style or old style, too busy to talk, provided that you met him with understanding, and were as impatient as he of digressions from the all-important theme. One soon gets tired of imparting information as to the wonders of hive-life to the ignorant and plainly apprehensive stranger, and none sooner than he of the old school. In the quietest apiary of pure-bred English bees there are always a few individuals of crotchety nature, who will search you out in the shady orchard seat, and, as like as not, knife you on the least provocation. If you are a beeman, you treat these vindictive approaches with unconcern. You go on listening to the old man’s talk, while the bee shrills away at your eyelids, or creeps into your ear and out again. If you keep quiet, she will soon relinquish the dull sport, and wing harmlessly away; and the thread of the master’s discourse is not interrupted. But the uninformed stranger is a nuisance at these solitudes for two. He flinches and shudders; makes little irritating retreats; beats about wildly with his hands; or, if he is made of the sternest metal, he sits rigidly upright when he should be reclining at his ease, and turns such a painfully polite, though distracted, ear to his informant, that the stream of talk is sure to dry up incontinently, and he feels as little welcome as ghostly Banquo at the feast.

When you have once lived among hives it is a sore thing to be without their music. On warm days, winter and summer alike, there is always this drowsy, dreamy song in the air; and dancing without the fiddlers is no more depressing an occupation than, to a beeman, is loitering in a garden of mere silent vegetables and flowers. Sitting now under the bower of apple-blossoms and watching for the swarms, the full sweet note from the hives comes over to you like the very voice of serene content. It pervades the sunshine. It gently qualifies the slow wind in the tree-tops. It lifts and falls like the lilt of a far-off summer sea. This is the labour-song: the song of the swarm is very different. To the trained ear the cæsura that presently comes in the midst of the music is as clear as a pistol-shot, though you may detect no change. The old bee-keeper stops short in his wandering tale about famous honey-years of half a lifetime back, seizes key and pan, and hurries across the garden. It is the old green hive again, he tells you, as you press hard upon his heels—it is always the old green hive that has swarmed the earliest every May for years back. And forthwith the key and pan begin their clattering ding-dong melody.

Old-fashioned bee-keeping is not always a matter of straw. Box-hives, without, of course, the modern inside furniture, have been in use nearly as long as the straw skep; and the hives in the garden are of this ancient pattern. The old green hive is keeping well up to its reputation. Already it is the centre of a swirling crowd of bees, and, as you look, a dense black stream of them is pouring out of the entrance so fast and furiously that it is almost impossible to distinguish what they are. And the old wild trek-song is growing louder and deeper with every moment, a rich vibrant tenor note unlike any other sound in nature. There is no doubt at all of its import, as you stand in the wing-darkened sunshine, caught up in the excitement of it all, and feeling much as if you were facing a tearing sou’-west gale. Every bee of the twenty or thirty thousand volleying madly to and fro overhead, is singing her bravest and loudest. There is only one meaning to the whole gargantuan chorus. It is sheer jubilation melodised: a wild, glad song of freedom, as though not a bee amongst them had ever before set eyes on the sunshine and the wealth of an English May.

The great door-key, a ponderous, antiquated piece of metal, beats out its clanging note, and the swarm lifts higher and higher into the blue. Gradually the sombre mist of bees draws closer together, looking now like a little dark cloud strayed from a forgotten summer storm. Now it sails slowly northward, and lightens, as the sunlight is caught by the beating wings as in a net of silver; and now it veers away into the very eye of the sun, and changes into black, revolving tracery again; whirring wheels within wheels of insect-life, spinning-wheels making thread to weave the garments of a whole nation, and humming as never spinning-wheels hummed before.

But the beginning of the end is nigh; the time of singing is nearly over. The old beeman stops his weird tom-tomming, throws down key and pan, and points to the topmost branch of a young apple-sapling. You see a little black knot of bees clinging to it no larger than a pigeon’s egg. A moment later, and it has grown to the size of a double fist, and another moment sees it twice this size again, as the flying bees stream towards it from all directions. Now it is as big as a quart measure, and the branch is slowly bending down under its weight. In an incredibly short space of time the whole swarm has joined the cluster; they hang together in a long, brown, glistening, cigar-shaped mass, well-nigh touching the ground, and the wild, merry music is over for good.

Gently swaying in the sunlight, lifeless and inert but for a few restless bees that hum about it, the sight of a settled swarm has an almost uncanny effect on most observers. A little before, the whole garden was filled with its deafening, joyous hubbub; now a strange silence has fallen, and it is impossible to dissociate from its present state the idea of an abject depression and disillusionment, as though the whole thing had been but a mad escapade, of which the bees were now heartily ashamed. If we may conceive the issue of a swarm to be a freak of ancestral memory, the sudden irresistible impulse to follow an old racial habit, long obsolete, it is not difficult to account for the obvious change of mind that has now come over the absconding host. Packed within the hive in a feverish, surging multitude, disabilities were not self-evident as they are now, tried in the light of day.

“Violent delights have violent ends, And, in their triumph, die.”

And now there is the morrow to be thought of: life to be rendered possible in all odds of weather; a home to be made; the queen-mother to be sheltered—she, the one remaining possession of the crowd, beggared now, but so rich a moment before. There is hard work ahead, enough to sober the giddiest among them. The madness has gone as quickly as it came, and now the honey-bee is to show herself a reasoning creature, if never before.

It is believed by most bee-keepers that a swarm selects the site of its future dwelling some time before the expedition starts, in many cases several days earlier. An old trick among cottagers is to place out empty hives in their gardens, and these not uncommonly attract errant swarms. A few bees are seen cruising about, and subjecting the hives to a close scrutiny. These pioneer bees disappear, and after a variable time, from a few minutes to a few hours, or even days, a whole army of bees suddenly descends from the sky and takes possession of the new home. When the interval between the appearance of the scouts and the arrival of the main body, is only a short one, the reconnoitring bees have been manifestly sent out by the clustered swarm; but in the case of long periods elapsing, the scouts must have been sent in search of the new location before the swarm issued. Probably, although the bulk of the party is imbued with this reckless spirit alone, thinking and caring for nothing else but the escape and the frolic, many of the older and wiser bees undertake the matter in a temperate, businesslike way, as they would go about any other important hive-operation. In one sense, therefore, the old notion of there being “subordinate lieutenants, captains, and governours” in a hive may not be so very far from the truth. That these scouts are actually sent out to find a suitable site for the new colony, either before the swarm leaves or while it is clustered in the open, is a well-established fact, so that some of the bees at least must keep their wits about them throughout the general chaos.

And with these wiser virgins must be reckoned the queen, in spite of the fact that she joins in the public excitement and restlessness. For some days before the great emigration her work of egg-laying is largely arrested, and this retentive action renders her so heavy and bulky that often she can scarcely get on the wing. The object of this is that she may be all the more ready for laying when the new home is established. It is also well ascertained that all swarming bees have their honey-sacs well filled, and this loading up for the journey takes place just before the signal for departure is given. There is great variation in the behaviour of the different stocks in a bee-garden during the swarming season, and many close observers are unable to detect any sure signs that a particular hive is going to swarm. But it appears fairly well established that, when a swarm is imminent, nearly all the bees of that stock remain at home, even when all other hives in the garden are in full foraging activity. Such a hive gives out a peculiar throbbing note, which suggests the noise made by a powerful locomotive brought to a standstill, but with full steam up, and impatient to be gone. Just before the issue of the swarm there is often a curious lull in this pent-up, forceful sound, and probably this is the moment when the travellers are lading themselves up for the march. Immediately after—and here it is difficult not to believe that a definite, authoritative signal for the movement is given—a sudden stir and tumult begins in the centre of the crowded hive, much like that caused by a heavy stone cast into water. This radiates swiftly in all directions until it reaches the bees near the entrance, and then the general rush for the daylight starts. Where a hive is much overcrowded there will already be a cluster of bees numbering many thousands packed tightly together on the alighting-board, and sometimes covering the whole face of the hive. But this mass melts away directly the swarming begins, the waiting bees taking wing all but simultaneously with the others.

It was anciently believed that the queen led the swarm, but this view is not borne out by modern observation. As often as not half the bees are on the wing before she makes her appearance, and sometimes she is among the very latest to leave, or she may decide at the last moment not to go at all. In this case the bees do not cluster, but after a few minutes’ wild tarantelle in the sunshine they all troop back to the hive.

When once the swarming-party has gone off, the old hive seems to settle down to its ordinary occupations as though nothing out of the way had happened. The congested state of affairs no longer exists, but otherwise the work of the hive is proceeding in the usual way. The bees left behind are mainly young workers who have not yet commenced foraging, but there is always a fair sprinkling of old workers and drones. Generally the hive is queenless for the time being, the new queen not having yet broken from her cell. There may be four or five queen-cells in various stages of development, or rarely as many as a dozen. Sometimes, however, the first of the queens will be already hatched and wandering over the combs, meeting, as usual at this stage of her career, perfect indifference from all she encounters. But hives have been known to send off a swarm when the preparations for raising a new queen have been scarcely begun. So variable is the honey-bee in all her ways.

If the objects of swarming were merely to relieve the congestion in the hive, and to change the mother-bee, the whole thing should now be at an end. But the swarming impulse is rooted in far deeper soil than mere expediency. With some strains of bees the fever seems to die out after the one attack, and the stock settles down quietly to work for the rest of the season. But more often than not this first taste of adventure serves only to whet the national appetite for more. About nine days after the first swarm leaves another swarm often follows, and this may be succeeded by a third or even a fourth at a few days’ interval, resulting in some cases in the almost complete extinction of the stock. The old skeppists called the second swarm a “cast,” the third was a “colt,” and the fourth a “filly.” It is difficult to understand how, in a community where individual interest is so ruthlessly sacrificed to the general good, this self-destructive policy should be permitted. But taking the view that swarming is in the main a vague and incomplete resurrection of a long obsolete habit in bee-life, a workable theory at once suggests itself. Under primæval conditions the continued life of the mother-colony may have been unnecessary. Its purpose may have been fully served when a number of young queens and drones had been raised, and the whole had swarmed out together, each to form a new settlement. It must be remembered that the bee-hive, persisting indefinitely from year to year, is really quite a modern creation, and became practicable only with the invention of the movable comb-frame, which allowed the bee-master to effect the renewal of combs. It has been seen that the brood-combs get gradually choked up with the pupa-cocoons, which each bee leaves behind it. These webs are so incredibly thin that a dozen of them make little appreciable difference to the capacity of the cell, and combs have been known to remain in use for brood-raising as long as twenty years. But eventually they must become useless; and then, as bees do not, or cannot, remove old combs to make way for new, the community must leave for a new home, or gradually die out. Thus the age of the old hives was definitely limited.

Modern beemanship has wrought many other changes in the life of the honey-bee in addition to creating the permanent hive-city. The number of bees in a single strong stock, housed in a modern frame hive, is probably three times as great as that of a wild colony. The work of the bee-master affects almost every aspect of bee-life, enlarging the scale and the scope of all that the bees attempt. The result of this is seen not only in an increased population and more extensive works, but in a change in the very systems of life. Plans that work very well on a small scale do not always succeed on a large. The sanitary problems of a city are necessarily very different from those of a village, in principle as well as in degree. And probably much of the ingenuity of system and device observable in modern hive-life is directly due to human agency, the new conditions introduced by the bee-master serving to educate the bees to greater effort and resource.

The behaviour of these after-swarms offers a curious contrast to that of the first one. If it were possible to point to one fixed and invariable law in bee-life, it would be to the fact that a prime swarm will leave the hive only on a fine, warm day, and generally about noon. But casts and colts and fillies seem to take no count of time or weather, issuing just as the mood besets them, early or late, and caring nothing, apparently, for the conditions abroad. It is even on record that once a second swarm came off at midnight, when the moon was at the full and the weather very clear and warm.

There seems altogether much more method in the madness that seizes on a colony swarming for the first time, and if thereafter the hive settles down to its old courses, the national character for sobriety and industry soon rehabilitates itself. But it is just the strength of this public inclination towards order and labour which varies so greatly in different hives. How matters are likely to go can be readily ascertained by setting careful watch on the hive from the day the first swarm leaves. There are sure to be several queen-cells, some capped over and almost ready to hatch out, and others in various stages of development. All these cells are constantly and assiduously guarded by the worker-bees, because directly one of the queens is hatched, her first thought is to make a speedy end to all future rivalry by murdering her sisters. She comes from her cell evidently spoiling for a fight, and imbued to the core with that inveterate hatred of her kind which is the ruling passion of her existence.

That worker-bees and queen-bees should have an identical origin, and yet that the nature of the one is to live in perfect harmony, while the nature of the other is to be at perpetual war, is one of those mysterious things in bee-life which probably will never be explained. If the queen-bee of to-day can be really taken as an approximate type of the aboriginal female of her race, it is not difficult to understand that after her generation in force the communal life of the mother-stock would become an impossibility, and that with the mating-swarm its natural existence was brought to a close, much as we see it happen in wasp-life.

It is during the quiet nights, after the issue of a swarm, that the peculiar shrill voice of the queen is most frequently heard. As she strives with the guards that surround the cells of the other young queens as yet unliberated, she continually utters this quick piping cry, and is immediately answered by the smothered cries of the imprisoned ones, who are just as anxious as she for the fray. If the swarming-fever is not yet allayed in the hive, this war-cry is bandied to and fro unceasingly; and the general ferment deepens, until, the condition of things having seemingly grown intolerable, the young queen rushes out, followed by the greater number of the bees. In the case of after-swarms, the concensus of evidence is in favour of the belief that the queen is really the leader of the party, although here again no positive rule is observed.

It may happen, however, that the stock is sick of all the turbulence and unrest that have so long beset it, and that the general desire is to restore the status quo. Under these conditions the sounds from the hive may have a very different quality and meaning. The queen still sends forth her shrill challenge, but now her cry is immediately followed by a curious hissing sound from the bees. It is exactly as if they were shouting her down, compelling her to silence by their own uproar; and when the war-cry of the first liberated queen is thus met by a chorus of disapprobation, it seldom happens that the stock swarms again. In a few days the queen goes forth alone on her honeymooning adventures; and on her return she is allowed to indulge her penchant for sororicide to her heart’s content.