CHAPTER V. The Commonwealth of the Hive

THE COMMONWEALTH OF THE HIVE

A DOCTOR DRYASDUST will manage to impart to the truths he meddles with a disastrous air of dulness and stagnation; but to walk in a fools’ paradise of beautiful, artistic error is to lay oneself open to an infinitely worse fate. There never was a truth in Nature that was dull or uninteresting, except in its human presentment. There never was a pretty worthless fiction that did not show its dross and tinsel when brought out into the searching light of day. Romance, the spirit of poetry, have largely changed their venue of recent years. The unconscionable delver among old things, old thoughts, old conventions, on the strand of Time, has tarried so long in his one little florid corner that he is in some danger of being caught by the tide. He must soon either mend his pace or swim for it. Human regard is turning more and more towards those who deal in living verities—the men who search the stars, who win new powers out of the common air, who find at last the authentic teachings in the old worn texts of the stones and brooks. These are the true poets, romancists, tellers of wondrous tales; and these will hold the crowd—which is never far astray in its intuitions—when all the singers of sick fancies and the harpers on frayed golden strings have gone off in melancholy dudgeon to their own place.

The old story—which has held such a long and honoured position in school text-books, and in the writings of those who tell of Nature’s wonders from the commanding watch-tower of the study fire—the old story of the queen-bee ruling her thirty or forty thousand dutiful subjects, and guiding them unerringly in all their marvellous exploits and enterprises, must go now with the rest. For the truth, as modern observers have unquestionably established it, is that the queen-bee is no ruler in the hive, but even a more obedient subject than any. The real instigators and contrivers of everything that takes place within the hive are the worker-bees themselves. The queen has neither part nor lot in the direction of the common polity; nor has she any power, mental or physical, to help in the carrying out of public works. Her sole duty is that of motherhood, and even in this she derives all initiative from the sovereign worker-bees. She is little more than an ingenious piece of mechanism, and carefully guarded and cherished accordingly. She has certain propensities, and certain elemental passions, which she can always be counted on to exercise in certain well-defined and limited ways. But as an intelligent, originating force she counts for nothing. The mind in the hive is the collective mind of the whole colony, apart from the queen and drones—an hereditary, communal intellect evolved through the ages, the sum and total of all bee experience since the world of bees began.

If, however, modern science compels us to divest the mother-bee of all her regal state and quality, and thus destroy one of the prettiest delusions of ancient times, it is only to take up a story of real life more alluring and romantic still. In the light of new understanding the old facts take on a mystery and excite a wonderment greater than ever before. If we found the life of the hive an enthralling study when we supposed it to originate from one winged atom endowed with acute and commanding abilities, how much more fascinating must it prove when we come to see that all this complex system of government is instituted and kept together by the harmonious working of tens of thousands of reasoning beings?

Reasoning—it is a big word, a double-edged thing that requires careful handling. We have been so long accustomed to use it only in regard to our own magnificent mental processes that it savours almost of the ridiculous to bring it to bear upon such a tiny et-cetera in the brute creation as the honey-bee. And yet, the deeper we go in the study of the bee and all her works, the more difficult it becomes to find a word that shall more fittingly meet the case. Instinct will not do. Instinct implies a dead perfection of motive, born of omniscience, working through unthinking, unvarying organisms to an equally perfect end. But in neither project nor performance can the honey-bee be said invariably to achieve, or even to aim at, perfection. It will be seen hereafter that her motives, her methods, the results she brings about, all show frequent, undeniable error or deviation. She attempts to carry through a sound enterprise, but abandons it on finding unforeseen difficulties in the way. She will persevere blindly in an obviously foolish piece of business, and fail to see her mistake until both energy and resources are at an end. Sudden emergencies may find her ready with the saving stroke of last ingenuity, or merely plunge her into listless despair. Courage, industry, economy, wise forethought, or still wiser afterthought, are all common traits in her nature. But she may develop idleness, unthrift, slovenliness, or even downright dishonesty, if chance or circumstance indicate the way.

And what are all these but the defects or attributes of reason? If bees and men, each admittedly rooted in divinity, be prone to the like failings and inconsequences, who shall discriminate between them, dividing arbitrarily natural cause and effect?

Watching bees at work for the first time through the glass panels of an observation hive, or in the almost equally informing modern hive with movable combs, this question continually arises, and there seems only one answer for it. There is something curiously human-like in their movements over the crowded combs, and the old comparison of a beehive to a city of men is never out of mind. There are the incessant hurryings to and fro; chance meetings of friends at odd street-corners; altercations where we can almost hear the surly complaint and tart reply; busy masons and tilers and warehouse-hands at work everywhere: a hundred different enterprises going forward in every thronging thoroughfare or narrow side-lane, from the great main entrance to the remotest drone-haunted corner of the hive.

You will see the huge, full-bodied queen labouring over the combs from cell to cell, with a circle of attendants ever about her. In the highest stories of the hive the honey-makers are at work, pouring the new-garnered sweets into the vats, or sealing over with impervious wax the mature honey. Where the nurseries are established, in the central and warmest region of the hive, the nurse-bees are hurrying incessantly over the combs, looking into each cell to mark the progress of the larvæ; giving each its due ration of bee-milk; or, when the time arrives, walling up the cell with a covering that shall insure its privacy, but freely admit the air. Here and there the young bees have awakened from their transforming slumber, and are clamouring at the stoppings of their prenatal tombs, gnawing their way out vigorously, or thrusting forth red, glistening, ravenous tongues, eager to end their long fast. Where these raw youngsters have at last won their way into existence, they can be seen assiduously grooming themselves, or searching the neighbouring comb for honey, while the nurse-bees are busy cleaning out the cells, just vacated, to make them ready for the queen when she comes by on her next egg laying round.

And all these operations are going forward simultaneously on an incredibly large scale. Certain amazing scraps of information are given to the wondering on-looker, which he hears, but can, at this stage in his progress, seldom rightly estimate. He is told that the queen is the only mother-bee in the colony, large as it is; that, in the prime of her maternity, she will lay as many as 3,000 eggs a day; and that she has the power to produce either male or female eggs, or none at all, at will. He is told that, except when she leads forth the swarm, she goes out of the hive only once in her life, and this is her wedding-trip. On this one occasion she has traffic with the drone somewhere incredibly high up in the blue air and sunshine of the summer’s day; and that immediate death is her suitor’s invariable portion; that she returns at once to the hive, and thereafter for the rest of her life, which may endure for years, she passes her time in immaculate widowhood, yet retaining her fertility to the end.

She is pointed out to the gaping novice as she travels her unceasing round of the brood-combs, and her various attributes are explained to him. He is shown how much larger she is than the worker-bee; how her bodily structure differs in a dozen important ways; how her instincts and habits resemble those of the common worker hardly in a single particular. Finally he is told something at which the most polite credulity may well demur. Although the mother-bee is to all appearances of a totally different race, the egg from which she was raised was identical with that which produces the little worker. Her bodily size, the change in the number and shape of her organs, her mental differences, are all due to treatment and diet alone. There is no reason why she should not have been an ordinary neuter working-bee, nor why any one of the thirty or forty thousand little workers in a hive should not have become a great queen-bee, the sole mother of an entire colony, save for the edict of the communal mind. More wonderful still, the drones, the male bees—the brothers, never the fathers, of their own hive, as has been so often stated—owe the fact of their sex entirely to the will or whim of the hive authorities, working through the docile agency of the queen. Until the moment before the egg is laid, the question of the sex of the resulting bee is held in abeyance. This big lusty drone, with exuberant masculinity obvious in every posture and act; his totally different organism; his incapacity for anything else than the fulfilment of the one office required of him, for he cannot even entirely feed himself; his habit of spending his life either in a comfortable lethargy of repletion at home, or in amorous knight-errantry abroad—this drone might have been a little plodding worker-bee, with shrunken yet elaborated body and curiously developed brain, whose one idea in life is to get through the largest amount of work before death claims her, and who is armed with a formidable poisoned sting, while the drone has none.

It is useless at this stage to tell the learner that all these vital differences—miracles, indeed, in the ordinary meaning of the word—are brought about by the leading powers of the hive in certain simple, easily explainable ways. He has lost, for the moment, all sight of and interest in the details, however extraordinary, in the perception that has dawned on him of the vastness of the entire plan. Here is a community that, to all appearances, has solved every problem relating to the well-being and progress of a crowded, highly organised society. Questions that are now vexing socialistic philosophers in the human world, or are looming dark in the immediate future—problems of numerical increase in relation to food-supply, the balance of the sexes, communal or individual ownership in property, due qualification for parenthood, the hegemony of might or right—all seem to have been happily settled long ago in this remarkable bee-commonwealth. In itself a prosperous, well-conducted hive appears to offer a living example, a perfect object-lesson of what Socialism, carried out to its last and sternest conclusions, must mean to human and apiarian communities alike. Here is a number of individuals—counting anything from ten thousand to fifty or sixty thousand, according to their condition and the time of year—living heathily and comfortably in the space of a few cubic feet. The principle, all for the greatest good of the greatest number, is elevated into a prime maxim, to which every one must bow. The fiction of royalty is maintained in harmony with the perfect republican spirit. The females are supreme in everything, the males in nothing. Growth of population is accelerated or retarded, according to estimations of the immediate or future supply of food. The proportion of the sexes is varied at will. The rule, that those who cannot work must not live, is applied with relentless consistency. All the garnered wealth of the State is held in common for the common good. When the settlement becomes too populous, and the boundaries cannot be extended, a large part of its inhabitants are forced to emigrate, taking with them only so much of the state property as they can carry in their haversacks, and relinquishing all claim to the rest. The governing females have apparently agreed among themselves that only one of their number shall exercise the privilege of motherhood; and when her fertility declines, she is deposed, and a new mother-bee, specially raised for the purpose, installed in her place.

All these, and a host of other facts as to bee-life, are crowded into the bewildered brain of the tiro until its capacity is exhausted, and he can take no more. He begins to see, at length, that he is approaching a great matter too fast, and from the wrong direction. Like a scholar who, resolving on a new and difficult branch of study, commences at the end of his treatise instead of at the beginning, he finds himself in the midst of terms and equations of which he knows nothing. All this desultory peering into hive-windows, and listening to scraps of astounding information, is nothing but opening the book of bee-life here and there at odd disjointed pages, getting a swift impression of certain lurid, kaleidoscopic details, but no grounding in the consecutive science of the facts. There is nothing for it—if he be resolved to know the life of the honey-bee truly—but to turn back to the first page of the volume, and steadily work his way through to the end—if end there be.

* * * * *

All know the English honey-bee—the Black Bee, as she is called, partly to distinguish her from her foreign rivals, and partly, it would seem, because she is not black at all, but a rich brown—but all do not know her origin. Probably she came to us from the tropics by easy stages, swarm out-flying swarm, until the most adventurous crossed the English Channel in remote ages, when it was only a narrow race of water, or even before Great Britain was detached from the mainland.

It was the black bee, and not the motley-coloured Italian or other varieties, who came to us thus, for the same reason, probably, that the Celts came—because they were a hardy race, loving, and being more fitted for the bracing northern atmosphere than the heat and languor of the south. Modern bee-breeders who are trying so hard to acclimatise in Britain the golden-girdled or silver-fringed bee-races of other lands, might well ponder this fact. No keener controversy rages to-day among English bee-masters than this one of the relative merits of native and foreign stocks. But assuredly Nature has not erred in this respect. South Down sheep can be reared in any county, but nowhere so fine as on the Sussex Downs. The like principle holds good with the English bee. The ages have evolved her from her tropic beginnings to make her what she is—a doughty, essentially British creature, thriving against all odds of fickle climate, when her more tender sisters from the south are hard put to it for a living. She has held her own against them, and more than her own. In bumper seasons, such as we get all too rarely, when, in sober truth, the land is flowing with honey, there is little to choose between the rival honey-makers. But through good and bad, early and late, for steady, dogged industry, invincible hardihood, tangible results, the English black bee has out-distanced all competitors. Thousands of years have gone to her making, and thousands more may conceivably fit the yellow-skirted Ligurian for British work. But labour for so remote a posterity were altruism meeter for angels than for men.

In her old primæval fastnesses the honey-bee is little likely to have troubled herself with hive-making, but to have hung her combs to some convenient branch in the forest, much as the bees in India do to-day. The habit of seeking some hollow tree or cleft in the rock grew upon her probably as she advanced northward, and some nightly or seasonal shelter became more and more an imperious need. The present-day customs of wild creatures give some inkling of their ancestral ways, but it is in their occasional aberrations from these customs that we get the truest indications of what their original state must have been. Lost swarms of bees, if they fail to pitch upon some better site, will often build in the open, either suspending their waxen houses from some horizontal branch, or making them in the heart of a thick bush.

The ways of the honey-bee are full of such deviations, due, perhaps, to the working of old ancestral memory rousing dimly in the midst of modern needs. The issue of a swarm may be nothing else than the survival of an old process, vital enough in its day, but, under the present civilised conditions of bee-life, lacking the whet of entire necessity. For, in all respects, the life of the bee, ancient as it is, is an evolved civilisation, and not a surviving, aboriginal state. It is conceivable that the foxes have their holes, and the birds their nests, much after the same fashion as in the days when Adam invented love-making. But the twentieth-century honey-bee is not of this kind. The communal habit itself may even have been a comparatively late introduction in her progress. It is possible to get some idea of the path she won for herself through the ages by studying the ways of creatures now living, but immeasurably less advanced than the bee. There are distant connections of hers—lonely little wood-wasps and others—which never associate with their kind, but get through the short summer hours in solitude, and die with the waning season, leaving the perpetuation of their species to the children they never see. The common wasp is nearer the honey-bee in development, but still infinitely far behind. The fecundated queen-wasp comes out of her winter hiding-place, fashions a cell or two in some hole in the ground, and deposits her first eggs, thus laying the foundation of a colony which, populous enough in the season, must nevertheless perish with the next winter chills.

In the primæval tropics the honey-bees may have lived in separate families, each with its teeming mother, its indolent, lie-abed father—the Turveydrop of creation—and its bevy of youngsters, every one going out, when grown, to establish a home for itself. The modern bee-city, with its complicated systems and laws, and its innumerable multitudes, may have originated only when change of habitat and climate brought about the necessity for a new order of things. Living in perpetual warmth, in a land where blossom followed blossom in unending succession, there would be no need for such co-operation. The one little family, snugging close in its moss-roofed corner, could sustain its own temperature; and where there was unceasing array of nectar-producing flowers, foresight would have been folly: the winter larder would have been left to take care of itself.

But as the young bees, leaving their homes, and flying ever northward, came first into temperate zones, and then into the fringe of Arctic influences, the conditions gradually changed. The perpetual sipping-garden was left behind; and a season came in each year—short at first, but inevitably lengthening—when there were no flowers. Hard necessity must have taught the bee, then, first to gather together with her kind for warmth during the cold season; and then, as this got longer and longer, to make some food-provision for winter days that would eke out endurance until the spring sun again wooed the earth into flower-giving. Thus the first communal bee-nests must have been evolved from the universal need of the race: the first common storehouses instituted: a host of unforeseen difficulties and side-issues encountered, and means for dealing with them contrived. The spirit of invention must have been busy then with the race, and taxed to the limit, of her resources. For never did Pandora open celestial casket upon earth with more redoubtable consequences, than when the Great Artificer set up the honey-bee as an examplar of city-building to the nomadic world of men.

From the crowding together of the separate bee-families for mutual protection against the elements, to a complete and permanent fusion of life and interests, must have been only a step, as Nature works. But then there must have been stirring times—social upheavals, educative disasters, a cataclysmic war of sex. Bee-life must have been shaken to its very foundations. When and how the woman-bee first got the upper hand in the direction of affairs, it is unimportant to determine. But it is certain that she got it, and has kept it ever since. The population problem must have been the great, overwhelming one. With hundreds of prolific mothers in the hive, each having enough to do at home in rearing her own children, and a crowd of lazy, irresponsible drones who could do nothing but dance in the sunshine or go a-wooing, how were the daily needs of the hive to be satisfied, leaving out of account the provision that must be made for coming winter days? It was clearly a case of reform or annihilation; and it may be conceived that the woman-bees, in default of masculine initiative, took the reins into their own hands.

It is a prophetic story. First they discovered their latent powers. The harmless ovipositor revealed itself as a prime weapon of offence. Thus the army was with the revolutionaries, and the rest was easy. A great, far-reaching scheme was set afoot. Motherhood was to be a privilege of the few and the fittest; work the compulsory lot of the mass. Hard times had already bred a lean, unfertile gang among them, and it was discovered that famine rations in the nursery meant a wholesale increase in these natural spinsters of the race. Henceforth the little sex-atrophied worker-bee was multiplied in the hive, while the fully nurtured mothers were gradually reduced to a few—at last to one alone. It was a triumph of collective self-sacrifice for the well-being and high persistence of the race.

All this may be imagined as having taken place in infinitely remote times, long before man succeeded in distinguishing himself from the apes. In the honey-bee of to-day, and her life in the modern hive, we get a sort of quintessence of the ages; a creature developed in mind and body by her unique conditions, these conditions again imposing upon her unique systems of life. Like Ruskin’s Venetian, she must live nobly or perish. Much more is required of her than the role of domestic and political economist. To make the modern beehive a possibility there must be architects, mathematicians, and chemists within its walls. Sanitary science must have its skilled exponents, or the hive would change into a death-trap within a few hours. There must be land-surveyors ready to explore the country, just before the issue of the swarms, to determine for them their new location. There must be overseers, gang-forewomen, everywhere to superintend every work in progress throughout the hive. Above all, there must be a supreme central power, a farseeing intelligence, to divine the imminent common need, and to set the forces of the State to work, in right time and order, to provide for it. If all these cannot be proved to exist in a hive of bees to-day, at least the necessity for them is undeniable; and as undeniable, the achieved results.