CHAPTER XIV. The Drone and His Story

THE DRONE AND HIS STORY

IT is true that all bee-keepers are enthusiasts, and true that long years spent in the companionship of the hives invariably create a fearless fellowship, a prime understanding between the bee-master and his legions. But it is equally true that the longer you study the nature of the honey-bee, the less enamoured you become of certain of her ways.

In the minds of old beemen there grows up, as the years glide, a sort of awe of her. She is so manifestly a power, supreme in her little world. She is so courageous, resourceful, brainy. All the weaknesses and compromises, and most of the pleasures, have long ago been driven out of her life, seemingly by her own act and will; yet, in doing this, she has but refined the science of citizenship to its pure elements. Her entire unselfishness, her readiness to sacrifice her individual good for the good of the State, are as unquestionable as they are changeless. The hive-polity, taken as a whole, is so admirable, and compares so advantageously with certain human efforts in the same way, that you are apt to exalt all her qualities into virtues; and to conclude that a far-seeing, wise benevolence must have gone to the making of the perfect Bee-State, instead of the cold, undeviating logic that alone has fashioned it.

This remorseless smelting-down of life into the set moulds of principle, without mercy and without reproach, has a cumulative effect on the mind of the observer; and sooner or later, though he will early lose his fear of her sting, he will develop a very real, but vague, awe of the honey-bee in another way.

Just as Moses Rusden, the King’s bee-master, held up the life of the hive as Nature’s evidence of the Divine will in earthly monarchy, so the latter-day student is often constrained to ask himself whether the bee-commonwealth does not point an authoritative moral in another way. Here is a State—only a mimic one, but still not a negligible example—where several of the most fiercely-debated questions of modern human life are seen in long adopted and perfected working-order, and seen in their fullness of result. Any attempt at a serious comparison between men and women, and the drone and worker-bee, would justly lay the writer open to the charge of grotesque trifling; but there is more than a fanciful analogy between the principles on which all civilisations must be based, whether they are insect or human. It cannot be denied that the communal life of the honey-bee is a high civilisation; that it has grown to be what it is to-day through ages of necessity; that the one sex has the other under a complete and terrible subjection, for which, and for the privilege of all power, the dominant sex has paid a terrible price.

The worker-bee to-day is an over-intellectual, neurotic, morbidly dutiful creature, while the drone is admittedly nothing but a stupid, happy, sensual lout. If the extreme difference between the sexes in bee-life had been aboriginal, the relations of drone and worker, as we see them in the hives to-day, would be meet and reasonable enough; but there seems to be clear evidence that, far back in the life of the race, the female bee was not so hopelessly superior to her mate. The queen-bee, in all likelihood, fairly represents the mother-bee as she was before the cooling crust of the earth made some sort of protected habitation necessary, which led first to close clustering for mutual warmth, and then gradually developed the complicated hive-life of to-day. But evolution will hardly account for all that we see: revolution must have had its part in the production of the modern self-unsexed worker. It has been seen that there is no physiological reason why each worker in the hive should not have grown into the fertile mother of thousands. The workers are not a stunted, specialised race, slowly evolved by time and necessity, and procreating their own stunted kind; but each worker is deliberately manufactured to a set pattern by the authorities in the hive, obedient to the call of the State. And when did the female bees begin this tampering with the springs of life, this improving upon Creation, which was the first vital step, failing which the present bee-commonwealth had been impossible? It looks very like a superb act of generalship in the great primæval war of sex—a brilliant piece of strategy that gave victory at a blow, and rendered the after-steps in the scheme of conquest a matter of logical sequence.

The whole question of the artificial production of the worker-bee is surrounded with difficulties; and it seems possible, on our present level of knowledge, to do little more than state the facts, and there leave them. The supremacy of the females in hive-life appears to have dated from the time that the vast majority deprived themselves, or were deprived by their immediate ancestors, of their share in procreation, and the ovipositor discovered itself as a weapon of offence and defence. Before the worker-bees existed as an armed force, there is no reason to suppose that the female bee had a great physical advantage over the drone. The queen-bee’s propensity to thrust her ovipositor into the spiracles of her rival, and so effectually to despatch her, as well as her inveterate hatred of her kind, may both be late developments, due to the isolated, artificial life she now leads. While the worker is ever ready with her sting, the queen uses it so rarely that many old experienced bee-keepers of the present time deny her altogether the power of stinging. A much more natural tendency with her is to bite; and when it comes to the use of the sharp, strong, sidelong jaws, the drone has a more redoubtable equipment than any, although he has apparently lost the will and sense to use it.

Whatever the drone may have been in far-off ages, the worker-bees have him now well under the iron heel of matriarchal expediency; and they see to it that he shall be fit only for the one indispensable office, although in that regard they exhaust every ingenuity to make him all that his kind should be. It is plain they would do without him altogether if that were possible. As it is, for nine months in the year there are no drones at all, and then only a few hundreds are raised in each hive—the bare minimum that will ensure the successful mating of the young queens when the summer sunshine calls them to their wooing. It might be supposed that where there are comparatively so few queens to be fertilised—only two or three at most from each hive, and these only once in a lifetime—that even those drones which are now tolerated are in excess of the number required. But a cardinal principle in bee-life is that the young queens shall choose their mates from another tribe, and so ensure a continual influx of new blood to the colony. This can only be effected out-of-doors, and as far as possible from the parent hive. The strongest impulse, therefore, of the virgin-queen, when she goes off on her mating-flight, is to get away quickly from her home surroundings. She flies straight off at tremendous speed, and thus has every chance of getting unperceived into new country, and so into the reconnoitring ground of strange drones.

Another reason for her extended flight and its remarkable pace is that only the strongest and swiftest drone of all the pursuing multitude is likely to overtake her, and this again makes for the betterment of the race. Perhaps there is no parallel instance in nature where the selection of the fittest individuals to continue a species is so carefully provided for, and no doubt this accounts for the high place of the honey-bee in the scale of created things. But this scheme involves enormous risk to the young queen. A hundred dangers lurk on her path. She is a tempting morsel for every bird that throngs the air of the June morning. Her untried wings may fail her. Even if she gets back safely to the bee-garden, she may enter the wrong hive, to her instant destruction. But she must take her chance of all risks; and the only thing to do is to render her absence from home as brief as may be, and her fertilisation as sure, by making the wandering drone-population large enough to cover all probable ranges of flight.

From the very first the drone is nurtured in a different way from the worker-bee. The egg is laid in a wider and deeper cell; and during its first three days of life the drone-larva is fed with bee-milk, probably of a special kind and certainly of more generous quantity. After the third day this chyle-food is reduced, as is the case with the worker-grub; but while the worker is then given only honey, it is certain that the drone-larva receives both honey and pollen, and that for a full day longer. In all, it takes about twenty-four or twenty-five days to produce the perfect drone-bee, as against an average twenty-one days for the worker. The queen-bee, as has been already seen, is developed in much less time than either, little more than a fortnight elapsing between the time the egg is laid and the time she is ready to gnaw her way out of the cell.

After the drone is hatched, it will be another two weeks or so before he makes his first venture in the open air. All this time he has the free run of the larder, and steadily gorges himself on honey when he is not sleeping off the effects of his surfeit in some snug, out-of-the-way corner of the hive. But honey is not his only, or even his principal, food. Throughout his whole life he is constantly fed by the house-bees with the rich chyle-food given to him as a larva, and it has been proved that if this is withheld from him for the space of three days he will die of starvation, even in the midst of abundant honey. Thus the worker-bees have him completely in their power.

The first flight of the drones is a stirring event in the bee-garden. The common sound of the hives goes on practically the whole year through. Every sunny midday, when the temperature mounts to 45° or 50°, will see each hive the centre of a little galaxy of singers: it is only the volume of the music that varies with the waxing or waning days. But with the coming of the drones the whole symphony of the bee-garden abruptly changes. They never move from their snug indoor quarters until the day is wearing on towards noon, and then only in the brightest weather. Blundering aggressively through the crowd of busy foragers, they rise heavily on the wing, and soon the ordinary note of the garden is drowned in the new uproar. They seem to come almost simultaneously from all hives at once. For a minute or two the rich, hoarse melody holds the air; and then, almost as suddenly, it dies away, as these roystering ne’er-do-wells troop off over hill and dale, each to his favourite hunting-ground.

There is great divergence of opinion as to the limits of flight of the drone, but probably he goes farther and faster than any have yet credited. His magnificent stretch and strength of wing mark him for a flier. He is all brute force and lusty energy; and it would be strange if, with but one thing to do in life—to gad about in search of amorous adventure—he could not do it to a purpose. If a hive of bees be removed to a distance in the height of the season, some of both workers and drones are sure to find their way back to the old spot. This has constantly taken place when hives have been carried no farther than two miles. But in one case, when the distance was more than twice as much, no workers were seen round the old hive-station, yet a little company of drones was winging aimlessly about the tenantless stool, and there can be little doubt that these belonged to the removed colony. It is not suggested that they deliberately travelled all these miles. The chances are that, in their daily flight, they got so far away from the new station that they came within the zone of old landmarks, and thus naturally went on by the long-accustomed ways.

As a typical instance of a sluggard and idler, the drone-bee has enjoyed a vogue in the preparatory-school books for ages past. But, whatever his primæval equipment for usefulness may have been, it is evident now that he could not labour if he would. Physically, in all points but that of muscle, as well as mentally, he has become degraded to the inferior of the worker-bee in every way. He is destitute of all those special contrivances with which she is so amply furnished. He has no baskets for pollen-carrying, nor any of the ingenious brushes and combs which she uses to scrape the pollen from herself and others. He has neither wax-generating organs, nor leg-pincers to deal with wax. His tongue is too short for honey-getting. His brain is much smaller than even that of the feeble-minded queen. The intricate gland-systems, which play so important a role in the daily life of the worker, are either completely atrophied in the drone or exist only in an elementary state. While it has been the communal will of the hive that the worker-bee should develop an amazing proficiency of mind and body, the same forces have been steadily at work to degrade the male-bee into a creature of dependence, gradually training out of him all initiative and idea, except in the one direction. Just as in the case of the queen and the worker, drone and worker-bee seem hardly to belong to the same race.

And yet, for all his frank incapabilities and lack of ideals, the drone offers, in one respect, a refreshing contrast to his sour, stern, duty-worshipping sister. He is a life-long, incorrigible optimist. He fiddles gaily while the city burns. All his misery and mourning would not serve to quench a single spark of it; so he eats, drinks, and is merry, with the intuition of all drones that Nemesis waits on the morrow with something disagreeable. It is impossible to study his ways for long without recognising the spirit of rude jollity and horse-play that thoroughly pervades all he does. In and out of the hive he blusters, cannoning roughly against all he meets, and raising his burly, bullying song in the air as a sort of protest against all this anxious industry going on about him. Once gone from the neighbourhood of the hive, he seems to keep incessantly on the wing until hunger prompts him home again. For no one has ever seen a drone-bee among the insects that haunt the flowers, nor ever seen him basking on a sunlit wall or tree-trunk, after the kind of almost every other winged atom in the universe.

He comes back to the hive with the same noisy, careless fanfaronade, and is received by the workers with the same sullen indifference. They give him his fill of bee-milk, linking tongues with him as he sits up like an overgrown baby, voracious, clamouring to be fed. They suffer him to swill at the honey-stores unchecked, but plainly regard him with contumely. He is a terrible expense to the State, yet a necessary one. Silently they go about their uncongenial business of nourishing him—silently, and with an ominous patience. They grudge him every drop, and, all the more, urge him to his excesses. It is not for long. The day of reckoning is near at hand. Already the poppies glow scarlet on the hill—the poppies that mark the turning-point of the summer; and after them the long decline, with its ever-diminishing sun-glow; each day with a scantier meed of blossom, until the path runs again into the dreary levels, the sober greys and russets, of winter death.

Now the worker-bee is to show a grizzly seam in her nature, matching ill with the fine hues and qualities of mind for which she is so justly famed. And that she is not all lovable, all admirable, accounts for the exceeding love of her that moves the hearts of men who know her through and through. The story of the massacre of the drones has hardly a parallel for sheer relentless ferocity—unrecking abandonment to a vengeance long withheld for expediency’s sake. There come the first chill nights of mid-July, and the honey-flow is suddenly at an end. The clover and sainfoin have already fallen to the sickle. Nothing but the bravest warmth and exuberance of the summer could now withstand the drain of the myriad honey-makers, and a few hours’ cold dams up at once the attenuated stream. The time of prosperity is over. There will be no more abundance of honey. It remains for the genius of hive-economy to prove how much of what has been gathered can be preserved for future needs.

The first sign of the débâcle is the throwing out at the hive entrance of certain pale, gruesome objects—the corpses of immature drones, not dead from mischance, but ruthlessly torn from their cells. This may go on intermittently for many days, and while the fell work is proceeding the living drones seem to take no warning. They keep up their merry round; the unending feast riots forward; daily the bee-garden is filled with their careless, overweening song. And then at last the signal for the slaughter is given. Within each hive a curious sobbing outcry begins—a cry that is nothing but sheer terror put into sound. The drones no longer lie in easy ranks between the combs, placidly sleeping off one debauch and dreaming of another. They are all awake now, and fleeing abjectly for their lives through the narrow ways of the bee-city, the workers in hot pursuit.

The deep, vibrant, horror-laden note increases hour by hour. As each executioner overtakes her victim, she grips him by the base of the wing; and, helped by others all alike infuriate at the work, she half drags, half pushes him through the throng, until she has him in the light of day, and tumbles with him to the ground; he for ever fighting and struggling, and uttering that frenzied note of fear; she savagely gnawing at the wing until it is disabled, and he can never more return to the hive. Many of the strongest drones escape from their persecutors for the time being, and fly away unhurt. But it is only for a few hours. Hunger is sure to bring them back to the hive, when the waiting guards fall upon them, and maim or drive them off once more. It is specially to be marked that the bees never sting the drones at this great annual feast of carnage. There is that much method in the madness which has seized upon them; for, in the rough-and-tumble of such a conflict, stings would be plucked out by the roots, and thus valuable lives would go down with the worthless. The sole object seems to be to rid the hives as effectively as possible of the presence of the drones; and the disablement of one wing appears to be all that is necessary, and therefore all for which the deft assassin strives.

With some bee-races the massacre of the drones is carried through in an incredibly short space of time; with others the agony of the thing is drawn out for days together. The wretched sires of the hive are caught between two evils, each as fatal as the other. If they fly off to the fields, starvation and the night-chills will swiftly bring about their end. If they return to the hive, a still speedier death awaits them. Night and day, at this time, the guard-bees are doubled and re-doubled at the city-gates; and there is little chance of the wiliest drone outwitting them. But he usually takes the home-hazard; and sooner or later comes blundering in, receiving with open arms, as it were, his share of the knife, as Huddlestone faced the Carbonari.

All this is the common way with the bee-republic, when the season goes as it should; and the hive is in possession of a mother-bee—young, strong, and of proved fecundity. But there are times when the drones—for all their great expense and drain on the wealth of the colony—are suffered to live on until the late autumn, or even to remain unmolested throughout the winter and following spring. If the bee-master sees drones about a hive, when other colonies have long ago made a good riddance of them, he well knows what ails the stock. Its queen is old and failing; and these astute amazons have given reprieve to their male-kind until a new mother-bee can be raised and properly mated. It is a case of mercy to the drones tempered with so much justice to themselves that the original virtue is largely discounted.

And where the drones are carried through the winter, it is ever a sign that the hive is not only without a queen, but never will contrive one, of their own race. Yet they know that, in the preservation of the drones, they have at least one indispensable element for their salvation, and—who shall gainsay it of the sovereign honey-bee?—perhaps they rely on the bee-master to guess their plight, and furnish them with another queen, in time to save his property from extinction.