CHAPTER XV. After the Feast

AFTER THE FEAST

AS the year grows in the bee-garden, so it goes, with all but imperceptible tread and tread. In southern England, after the seed-hay is down, there is little more for the bees to do but prepare their hives for the coming winter. The queen is slowly weaned from her absorption in egg-laying by a gradual change in food. Day by day she receives less of the mysterious bee-milk which was her urging and inspiration; day after day she finds herself the more constrained to slake her hunger at the open honey-cells with the common crowd. Every day sees fewer bee-children born to the hive, and every day sees more and more of the old workers—worn out with a short six weeks or so of summer toil—pass away in that inexplicable fashion, using, perchance, their last strength of wing to hie them to the traditional graveyard of their kind. What becomes of them all, not the wisest among beemen knows; but it is certain that, as they lived by communal principle, in the same faith they die; and their last act may be the truly collective one—of removing their own bodies out of the way of harm to the cherished State.

With the waning months, the population of the hive decreases visibly, and, as their numbers fail, the temper of the bees suffers just as evident a change. Old bee-keepers know by sharp experience that early autumn is a time when vigilance well repays itself. For all life the season of autumn has its peculiar tests and trials of character; and this is especially true with regard to the honey-bee. Each strain of bees has its proclivities, good or bad, which are sure to come to the front at this season. And, more than any, bad qualities will show themselves, now that the rush of the year’s work is over, and the common energy must take its course through an ever shallowing and straitening way.

To find rank dishonesty in a creature of so small account in creation as an insect, is rather startling to old-fashioned ideas; but it is nevertheless beyond dispute that some stocks of bees are prone to develop a tendency to housebreaking and robbery of their neighbour’s goods during early autumn, and, in a lesser degree, when the first scanty supply of nectar begins in early spring.

Virgil, and almost all the classic writers, give stirring accounts of the frequent battles among bees in their day. We are told of vast conflicts taking place in mid-air, of the kings leading forth their hosts of warriors—the din of carnage—the wounded and dying falling like rain out of the blue of the summer sky. These descriptions have always been a great puzzle to modern students of bee-life, because nothing of the kind seems to take place at the present day. Each hive goes about its business, apparently in complete disregard of the existence of other hives. Neither at home, nor abroad in the fields, are reprisals ever witnessed among bees, whether singly or collectively. The most peaceable creature in the world is the honey-bee, except in the single case when her home is being wantonly assailed.

But in autumn frequent encounters take place between robber-bees and the hive they are attacking, and one is constrained to believe that it is of this Virgil writes.

Perhaps when once a stock has discovered that stealing honey is a much quicker and easier method of obtaining it than by the laborious process of gathering, these particular bees will never again be won back to honest courses. Not only will the parent hive continue to break out in this way at the close of every season, but all swarms from the same hive are certain to develop the like tendencies. The strain will be a continual source of annoyance and loss to the bee-master, and, if he be wise, he will take the shortest and surest way of putting an end to the trouble, by promptly changing the queen, and thus in the end exterminating the original stock. Where this is in his own garden, there will be no difficulty in the matter; but often the robbers are wild bees, brigands inhabiting a hollow tree in some neighbouring wood, and making sudden raids upon their law-abiding neighbours in adjacent villages, after the manner of brigands all the world over. The strangers have often a peculiar appearance, which singles them out immediately from the legitimate members of the gardens. They are darker in colour and shinier; and they have a bold, yet furtive, way of getting about, which suggests at once the prowling marauder.

Wandering among the hives on a fine September morning, several of these light-fingered, sinister folk may be seen hovering about the entrance to a hive, or trying to creep in unobserved. Their presence is promptly detected, and a sudden hubbub arises as the guard-bees set upon the intruders and drive them off. There is no doubt of their intention. They are spies from the robber camp, and their object is to discover those hives which are weak in population, and so will fall the easier prey to the depredators when in force. Strong stocks have little to fear from robbers; they can always hold their own against attack, and therefore are seldom molested.

These scouts disappear for a time, and the hive settles down to its wonted, busy tranquillity. But soon a little blur of bees may be seen coming over the hedge-top, and making straight for the selected hive. There is no more crafty reconnoitring. It is to be battle undisguised. The robbers descend upon their prey, and at once a terrific uproar begins, a desperate hand-to-hand fight between besiegers and besieged. Left to themselves, the weak stock will have little chance from the outset. It is quickly overcome. And then a curious thing often happens. The bees of the home-colony which have survived the fight, join forces with the victors, and themselves help to rifle and carry away to the robbers’ lair the treasure which is their own by right. Luckily, the bee-master has an all but unfailing preventive of this vexatious trouble ready to his hand. He can safely leave all those hives which are numerically strong of citizens to take care of themselves, and those which are weak of population he can join together in twos or threes, converting them also into strong, self-protective colonies. The modern movable-comb hive is a power in the hands of the capable beeman, for the comb-frames from several hives can be placed together in one, and the bees will unite quite peaceably at this season, if all are well dusted with a flour-dredger, or treated with a scent-spray, so that in odour and appearance they may be alike. Probably every hive has its own distinct odour, which is shared by all its denizens, and this is no doubt the means by which the sentinel bees at the entrance recognise their own comrades, while they promptly fall upon all interloping strangers.

The preparation of the hive for the winter is of a piece with all else that the bee undertakes. As the area of the brood-nest shrinks, the empty cells are filled with honey, this being brought down from the store-cells farthest away. The foragers keep steadily at work whenever the weather holds, gathering up the remnants of the feast and bringing them home to swell the winter-larder. Where there is much ivy, a fine October will often see the hives as busy again as ever they were in the bravest days of June; but the throng of bees is manifestly smaller. The rich song of life begins later in the day, and lasts only during the brightest hours; and that wonderful night-sound, the deep underground thunder of the fanning bees, is gone from the bee-garden, just as the scent of the clover-nectar, brewing and steaming in the hives, no longer drifts across in the darkness, filling the bee-master’s house with the fragrance he loves more than all else in the world.

The old ragged-winged bees, that have stood the brunt of the season, are now, too, nearly all gone. The hives are filled with bees of the same race, inspired by the same traditions; but they are at the beginning of life, the raw recruits of destiny, a mere stop-gap crew. They have no memories of the time when work was a fever, a tumultuous race with the sun, in which the swiftest must lag behind. They have never known the over-weighty cargoes, the bursting honey-sacs, and pollen-panniers so laden that they could be scarce dragged into the hive, and they will never know them. These bees, born late in the season, have their lot cast in the torpid backwaters of their little world. Theirs is to be but a dreary eking out of days, so that they may have strength enough to warm the first spring broods into life. The few hot days that burn in the midst of the snows of each English March—immeasurably far off now, and unattainable, seemingly—will be all they will ever see of the power of sunshine. Winter bees are born to the prison-house; and in it, and for it, live and die.

At the most, a worker-bee sees but six months of life: at the least—and this is the lot of many—she withstands the incessant wear and tear of her hard calling for six, or possibly eight, weeks. Thus, though the hive may be always packed with citizens, the population is for ever changing. Half a dozen times in the year, perhaps, and for a score of years, you may go to your bee-garden, and each time move among tens of thousands to whom you are an utter stranger, and whom you have never seen before. And yet, in all its customs, its propensities, its traditions, the life of the bees is Continuity impersonified. You may go round the world, and spend ten years on the journey; and, coming back to the old leafy nook of the country, find the old green hive still in its corner under the lilac, still the centre of what seems the same crowd of winged merchant-women sailing home under the same gay colours, singing the old glad songs, building the old wondrous fabrics in the darkness, transmuting the same fragrant essences into the same elixir of gold. And what is this mysterious thing called the Bee-Commonwealth, which is alone immortal, while all that composes it, and pertains to it, and upholds it, passes and dies?

You must not forget the queen-bee here. She alone, it must be remembered, persists year in and year out, while generation after generation of her children grow up and die about her—a hundred thousand of them, may-be, in each twelve-month, thousands even between one single summer dawn and the dusk of the western sky. Methuselah of old, on the more moderate human scale, must have had some such experience—must have divined the broader plan of life from the incessant repetitions of chance and change that passed before him. The power to generalise into symbols comes only to the ancient of days; and he of all men had learnt to fathom, to estimate, to winnow out the sober drab grain from the glittering, rainbow chaff of life. Over and over again he must have kept the true true to itself with one wise word, and turned back the false, dazzled and discomfited, with one flash from his mirror of the ages. He was a living history-book, where all men might read the common drift and outcome of life; and as a record of the hive’s story, a living archive for its plans, its systems, its ideals, the mother-bee may exist to day—she who, in comparison with its ever coming and going thousands, is an age-old, imperishable thing.

And so you may think of her, in the short days of December twilight, or in the interminable night-darkness full of the raging of the winter wind, gathering her children about her, and telling them tales of their forbears’ prowess; teaching them old bee-songs which have but the one refrain of work and winning; and never forgetting her own little story—of the one brief hour of her love-flight and marriage, bought and paid for by widowhood lasting her whole life.