CHAPTER VII. The Genesis of the Queen

THE GENESIS OF THE QUEEN

IT has been said that the ways of the honey-bee are nearly all subject to variation—that in bee-life there are few hard-and-fast, undeviating laws. The rule, of one queen-mother only to each hive, appears to be more absolute than any other, yet it is not without its exceptions. Well authenticated instances are on record where two queens have existed amicably in the same hive, each laying her daily quota of eggs unmolested by the other, and, apparently, with the full approval of the hive-authorities.

It is now also certain that a skilful bee-master can accustom his bees to the presence of more than one queen. Recent experiments in America on this head, although convincing enough as far as they go, need the test of time before their practical value to apiculture can be rightly estimated. To multiply its domestic deities may prove anything but a blessing to the harmony and welfare of a hive. But the fact has been well established that the old rule, of one queen at a time, may be upset—whether permanently, and for the ultimate advantage of honey-making, time alone can tell.

A single queen, when young and vigorous and of good blood, is able to keep an entire hive filled with brood throughout the short honey-gathering season. The brood-nest of a modern frame-bar hive has a comb-surface of over 2,000 square inches, giving about 50,000 cells available for the breeding of young worker-bees. This represents, at times of greatest prosperity, an enormous floating population; but if several queens can be permanently established in one hive, and the hives enlarged to permit each her fullest scope, the figures will soon begin to stretch out into infinity. Two facts are well known to experienced bee-keepers—that a large stock gathers more honey than two small stocks containing between them the same number of individuals; and that, when the honey-crop is in full yield, there are seldom enough bees to harvest it. The whole art of latter-day bee-keeping consists in bringing up the numerical strength of each colony to its fullest in time for the great main nectar-flow. Yet, in a good district and in a good season, when huge areas of clover or sainfoin come into full blossom at the same time, and the nectar must be gathered or lost within the space of a fortnight or so, the most populous apiary is seldom equal to the task. Probably, in exceptional seasons, half the English honey-crop is lost for want of bees to gather it. If, therefore, the new system of plurality of queens both justifies and establishes itself, the near future may see a revolution in all ideas relating to beemanship. All that can be said for certain at present is that as many as five queens have been induced to occupy the same hive in peace and quiet together; but whether this portentous state of affairs can remain a lasting one is still to be proved.

A curious and, to the expert, a startling outcome of these efforts to break down an old and almost universal custom in bee-life, is that the successful establishment of several mother-bees in a single hive appears to lessen the swarming impulse. Hives so treated do not send out a swarm so far as is known. One of the most disappointing experiences in bee-craft is to see prosperous stocks breaking themselves up into several hopelessly weak detachments just before the great honey-flow, when strength of numbers is the one vital thing; and if plurality of queens will prevent this vexatious evil, the old time-honoured custom is sure to go.

The student of bee-life, watching the year’s work in the hive from its earliest beginnings, and marking its steady, cautious development, will readily see how the ancient idea of the mother-bee’s absolute monarchy gained its vogue. The deception of appearances is all but complete. Right in the heart of the winter-cluster he sees the queen bestirring herself to lay the first eggs, and the bees around her slowly awakening to the duty before them. With the passing of the weeks, he sees the brood-area steadily enlarging; the hitherto close-packed throng of workers gradually extending itself over a larger space of comb; the water-fetchers increasingly busy; the pollen-gathering bees already at work in the crocus-borders of the garden, where the year’s first gold and white and purple is gaily flaunting in the sun. He notes that the progress of the colony within the warm hive does not go by the calendar, but checks with each return of cold, and forges ahead only when the spring seems to be coming in right good earnest. He sees, even now, when February is waning and the hazel-catkins fill the bare woodland with a shimmer of emerald, that the colony still husbands its stores, eking them out with a long-sighted parsimony that shall be more than justified when the inevitable cold break comes in the flowery midst of the English May. It is impossible to overlook the evidence of a wise, directing mind through it all; and where should this be seated but in the brain of the single large bee, courted and fed and groomed unceasingly by the attendant host around her—she who is the teeming mother of past tens of thousands, and who carries in her body the seed of all the generations to come?

Yet the truth is that the queen-bee is the very reverse of a monarch, both by nature and inclination. She possesses only the merest rudiment of intelligence. She has a magnificent body, great docility, certain almost unrestrainable impulse and passions, a yielding, womanish love of the yoke; but she is incapable of action other than that arising from her bodily promptings. Her brain is much smaller than that of the worker. In a dozen different ways she is inferior to the common worker-bees, who rule her absolutely, mapping out her entire daily life and using her for the good of the colony, just as a delicate, costly piece of mechanism is used by human craftsmen to produce some necessary article of trade.

In a word, the queen is the sole surviving representative of the aboriginal female honey-bee. The aborted females, the workers, are almost as much a product of civilisation as the human race itself.

Every step of the way now, in a study of the life of the bee, is hedged about with wonders. It is seen that the common worker-bee is raised in a cell allowing her only the barest minimum of space for development, while the queen has an apartment twice as long as she can possibly need. The worker-cells are so designed that as many a possible may be contained in a given area, and their construction involve the least possible amount of material. Therefore these cells are made in the form of a hexagon, this being the only shape approaching the cylindrical—the ideal form—of which a number will fit together over a plane surface without leaving useless spaces in between. Moreover, the cells needing to be closed at the bottom, half the material required for this purpose is saved by the device of placing the sheets of combined hexagons back to back, so that one base will serve for two cells. But it is not only in the construction of the cradles of the worker-bees that rigid economy is practised. From the moment that the egg hatches until the young grub changes into the chrysalis state, it is given only the smallest quantity of food that will support life and allow necessary development.

In the case of the young queen-larva, however, a very different policy is instituted from the beginning. Not only is she given nursery-quarters allowing every facility for growth, but she is loaded with a specially rich kind of food night and day, until she actually swims in it. The nurse-bees are constantly pouring this glistening white substance into the cell for the whole five days of her larval existence, and the effect of this generous diet is obvious from the first in her more rapid growth, as compared with the worker-bee. A further advantage still is that the young queen has perfectly free access to the air at all stages of her development. The worker-cell is but sparsely ventilated, and that only through the narrow top, all its six sides and base being absolutely impervious. But the cradle-cell of the queen is not only made of a porous material throughout, but it is commonly placed at the edge of the comb, where it stand out in the full current of ventilation, the air percolating the whole substance of its walls in addition to entering freely at the large cell-mouth. Thus the main cause of the extraordinary difference in the development of the queen-bee and the worker is that of treatment; the one being given unlimited rich food and oxygen and room to grow in, the other receiving only meagre workhouse diet, restricted quarters, and little air to breathe.

Yet, making every allowance for the stimulating or retarding effect of these agencies on the young female grub, we are still hardly any nearer to solution of the mystery. We are compelled to believe that the egg which produces the worker is identical in its nature with that from which is evolved the queen-bee, because a simple experiment will at once dispel all doubt on the matter. If the egg deposited in the queen-cell be removed and an egg taken from any one of the thousand of worker-cells in a hive be put in its place, the worker-egg will always produce a fully developed and accoutred queen-bee. On the other hand, if an egg be taken from a queen-cell and placed in a worker-cell, it will as infallibly hatch out into a common undersized worker. It would be sufficient tax on the credibility if the differences of queen and worker were only those of degree. If the queen were nothing but a large-sized worker-bee, in whom certain organs—which were atrophied in the worker—had received their full development, it would be a fact within comprehension; but the queen differs from the worker not only in size and the capability of her organism, but also on several important points of structure. And how can mere food and air and circumstance produce structural change? The worker has many bodily appliances, special members ingeniously adapted to her daily tasks, of which the queen is wholly destitute; while the physical organism of the queen varies from that of the worker in several important degrees.

Some of these must be enumerated. The abdomen of the worker is comparatively short and rounded: that of the queen is larger and longer, and comes to a fairly sharp point. The jaws of the queen are notched on their inner cutting edge: the worker’s jaws are smooth like the edge of a knife. The tongue of the worker has a spatula at its extremity, and is furnished with sensitive hairs: the tongue of the queen is shorter, the spatula is smaller, while the hairs show greater length. The worker-bee has a complicated system of wax-secreting discs under the horny plates of her abdomen: in the queen these are absent, nor can the most elementary trace of them be discovered. In their nerve-systems the two show difference, the queen possessing only four abdominal ganglia, while the worker has five. The queen’s sting is curved, and longer than the worker’s: the sting of the worker-bee is perfectly straight. On their hind-legs the workers have a curious contrivance which bee-keepers have named the pollen-basket. It is a hollowing of the thigh, the cavity being surrounded with stiff hairs; and within this the pollen is packed and carried home to the hive. In the queen both the cavity and the hairs are absent. Her colour also is generally different from that of the worker-bee, her legs, in particular, being a much redder brown.

Here is a problem for our great biologists—a problem, however, at which the plain, every-day man may well flinch. For we seem to have come face to face with new principles of organic life, facts incompatible with the accepted ideas of the inevitable relation between cause and effect. The irresistible tendency at this stage is to hark back; to repeat the experiment of the transposed eggs, and see whether no vital, initial circumstance has been overlooked. But the result is always the same. Nor can the most careful microscopical dissection of the eggs themselves reveal any differences. In this mystery of the structural variance between queen and worker, it would seem that we are forced to accept one of three alternatives. Either the egg contains two distinct germs of life, one developing only under the stress of hard times, the other only to the call of luxury. Or we must go back to mediæval notions, and believe that the worker-bees give or withhold some vital principle of their own during nurturing operations. Or we must give up the problem, and decide that creation works on lines very different from those on which we have hitherto grounded our faith.

The difficulty is further complicated by the fact that this change of nature does not take place until relatively late in the life of the bee. The egg is three days in hatching. But the young larva is at least three more days old before nature has made the irrevocable step along either of the divergent ways. For the experiment of transposition can be made with exactly the same result if undertaken with female bee-larvæ not more than three days old, instead of the unhatched eggs. Indeed, this is an operation that the nurse-bees themselves perform, on occasion. If a hive loses its queen, and it happens that all the eggs in the worker-cells are hatched out, the bees will breed another queen from any one of the worker-larva available. This is generally successful when the young grub has not passed the three days’ limit. But, even when all the larvæ of the hive are older than this, the bees will still attempt the task, knowing well that, without a queen, the colony must perish. In this case, however, the resulting queen will be defective in various ways. Probably she will never be capable of fertilisation, and therefore the breed of worker-bees will be cut off at its source. Unless the bee-master supplies the colony with a new queen, properly fecundated, the hive will gradually fill up with drones, the old worker-bees will die off, and the stock must ultimately become extinct.

When once the study of the inner life of the honey-bee has been undertaken, the watcher will soon realise that he has embarked on a stranger voyage than he ever contemplated, even in his most daring moments. In the old bee-garden there was a serenity, a quiet enduring bliss of ignorance, that chimed in well with his slothful, holiday mood. The sunshine, the flowers, the song of the wind in the tree-tops, and the drowsy song of the hives; the voice of the old white-headed cottager weaving in his listener’s ear the old, comfortable arabesque of error; the sudden, jubilant uproar of a swarm, filling the blue sky with music and the flash of unnumbered wings; the night-quiet, with its deep underground bee-murmur, its dim half-moon peering over the hill-top, the shadowy bent figure of the old beeman listening at hive-doors for the battle-cry of rival queens, that should mean trouble on the morrow—it all comes back to the watcher now as a haven he has left inconsiderately, for a voyage over unknown, stormy seas. For now, with the inner life of the hive going on unmasked before his very eyes, wonder succeeds wonder almost without a break; and each new fact that reveals itself is more perturbing, because more destructive of old, hallowed convention, than any that has gone before.

The hive that has lost its mother-bee, and failed to provide her with a fully developed, fertile successor, is seen to be rapidly declining in its worker-population, while the horde of drones is increasing at a greater rate than ever. But where do these drones come from, if the very fount of bee-life has been dried up at its source by the loss of a fertilised queen? The question brings the student to what is perhaps the most remarkable fact in the whole great book of natural history.

We are not concerned, for the moment, with theological matters; nor will the thread of the story of the honey-bee be laid down, however briefly, for an excursion into the pulpit. Yet here is something that may well give wherewithal for thought. For nearly two thousand years the Doctrine of the Virgin Birth has been the centre of a bitter human controversy. Its liegemen uphold it as a main article of faith, eternally exalted from the odious need of proof; its temperate opposers sadly and quietly set it aside as a natural impossibility. On one side the charge is want of faith; on the other of blind credulity. And yet no one seems to have thought of looking into paths of creation other than human, to see if no parallel exists that may help both sides, and send the swords to sheath before a common mystery. The honey-bee is small among the fowls, but here she looms large in the world, a portentous symbol. It is a fact, now incontestably proved, that the virgin queen-bee is capable of reproducing her kind, yet only the male of the species. If she is born late in the year, when no drones exist, and her fertilisation is therefore impossible, or if some imperfection of wing prevents her going out for her mating-flight, she will still set busily to work at her one function of egg-laying; and these eggs will all hatch out into male bees. The same thing occurs in the case of the queenless hive, which, having neither worker-egg nor worker-grub, whose age is under the three days’ limit, yet tries to raise a new queen from a larva perhaps four or even five days old. The queen thus created is queen only in name. She may have her ovaries completely developed, but otherwise she will be congenitally destitute. She will have neither the will nor power to receive the drone; and the eggs that she lays so industriously only add to the crowd of useless males that will soon be the sole representatives of the doomed household.

Following the progress of a bee-colony through the mounting days of spring, we see, with every week that passes, a larger area of comb occupied by the young worker-brood; while about the middle of April the queen pays her first visit to the drone-combs, laying a single egg in each cell, as with the rest. It is commonly supposed that the queen is always surrounded by an adulatory retinue, each attendant bee keeping her head respectfully towards her sovereign, and backing before her as she progresses over the combs. Something of this sort is constantly seen during breeding-time, but at other seasons the queen ordinarily receives little attention, passing to and fro in the hive with no more ceremony than is bestowed on any other of the bees. The mediæval writers were aware that the queen had these attendants, and believed them always to be twelve in number, representing the twelve Apostles. A little observation, however, will soon make it clear that the bees which surround the queen on her egg-laying journeys are neither devotees nor courtiers. They are actually her guides, her keepers. The queen’s movements are all prompted by the incessant strokings and pushings and gentle touches of the antennæ that she receives from these. Thus they allow her free passage over the combs, but stop her at each vacant cell, gathering close about her, evidently with the most absorbing anxiety and interest in the operation. First, she peers into the cell, examining it carefully. Then she rears; the bees give way before her; she takes a step or two onward until the end of her body is over the cell. And then she thrusts her abdomen deep into it, pauses a moment, mounts again upon the comb, and the attendant bees at once resume charge of her, and manœuvre her towards the next empty cell. This process never seems hurried, and yet in the height of the breeding season it must go on at an extraordinary pace. It is well attested that a good queen will thus furnish as many as two thousand to three thousand cells in a day, which gives an average of two eggs a minute, even supposing her to keep at the work without pause for the whole twenty-four hours.

The cells designed to contain the worker-brood measure one-fifth of an inch across the mouth; drone cells are larger, having a diameter of a quarter-inch, as well as greater depth. The queen may pass from one species of comb to the other, but she seldom makes a mistake. The egg deposited in the worker-cell hatches out a female; that which is laid in the larger cell becomes a drone, or male bee. Obviously the deposition of the different kinds of eggs is well under the control of the queen. It will be also seen that not only does the mother bee lay either male or female eggs at will, but their number also is subject to her discrimination. From the time when she begins ovipositing, until she reaches her period of greatest activity in early summer, the increase of the colony is not regular, but goes by fits and starts according to the weather, or the amount of incoming food. If the new honey is steadily mounting up in the storehouse, and pollen is plentiful, the work of brood-raising will go freely ahead; but if unseasonable cold stops the work of the foragers, this will immediately affect the output of the queen, and under exceptionally adverse conditions egg-laying may be entirely arrested. This may also take place in the height of the season, and in full favour of sunshine and plenty, if the hive is a small one, and the limit of its capacity has been reached. The combs will then be full of either honey or brood, and the queen must wait until laying space can be cleared for her. That she is able to do this—that her powers can be augmented or restrained, according to the needs of the colony, and that the proportion of the sexes in the hive can be varied at will to suit like contingencies—can only be understood when the details of her life-history have been passed under review.

In the normal, prosperous colony, which we are now studying, the queen will be in her prime, and under natural conditions will remain at the head of affairs until she goes out with the first swarm in May or June. A queen-bee is at the zenith of her fecundity in the second year of her life. After that, her egg-laying powers steadily decline, although she may live to be four, or even five, years old. But the authorities in a hive rarely allow a mother-bee to retain her position after she has shown signs of waning energy. Preparations are at once set on foot for the raising of another queen.

A very old queen will have lost her power to lay worker-eggs, and will have become nothing but a drone-breeder. But the bees are seldom caught napping in this way. Long before this happens the building of the royal cells will have commenced in the hive. A queen-cell has been likened, by various writers, to an acorn, and when half completed it bears a very close resemblance, both in size and shape, to an inverted acorn-cup. This is commonly hung mouth downwards at the side or base of one of the central brood-combs, but it may be placed right in the middle of the comb, in which case the cells around it are cut away to give it air and space. Whether the old queen herself deposits the egg in the royal cell—thus unwittingly supplying the means for her own future dethronement—or whether the worker-bees transfer to it an egg or grub from a common cell, is not yet finally ascertained. As, however, the mere sight of a royal cell usually excites the queen to fury, the chances are that she is never allowed to approach it at any time, and the egg would then be placed there by the worker-bees. But, in the great majority of cases, it is probable that new queens are raised by enlarging an already existing worker-cell, in which an egg has been previously deposited. As far as is known, this is always the case when a young grub is used for the purpose instead of an egg. It is possible, also, that the queen is physically incapable of laying in a royal cell an egg that will produce a female bee; but this curious point will be touched upon at a later stage.

The old trite saying among beemen, that bees never do anything invariably, receives constant illustration in any near study of the ways of the honey-bee. It has been seen that a colony deprived of its queen, and having no worker-egg or grub less than three days old wherewith to make good its deficiency, is commonly doomed to early extinction. But, on rare occasions, colonies supposed to be in this plight will make an unexpected and inexplicable recovery. After a period of the doldrums, extending for three weeks or more, a sudden renewed activity and exhilaration is observable in the hive. The pollen-bearers, who have been hitherto almost idle, resume their busy work; and, on the hive being opened, all the evidences of the presence of a fertile, laying queen-mother are again to be seen. In many instances in which a new lease of life has thus been vouchsafed to a colony under what seems an inexorable ban, no doubt appearances have been deceptive. The bees may have discovered in their midst a worker-larva not yet too far advanced for promotion to queenship, and thus have achieved their salvation at the eleventh hour. But, in at least one case, the testimony against the possibility of this seems complete. A nucleus stock, containing only three or four small combs and only about five hundred bees, was deprived of its queen. Ten days later every queen-cell that had been formed in the interval was destroyed, leaving in the hive not a single egg or bee in the larval state. Nevertheless, on the hive being opened after a further period of eighteen days, one new queen-cell containing an egg was discovered. And this egg duly hatched out into a fine, well-developed queen-bee. Assuming the facts to be true, and they seem to be incontrovertible, there is only one inference to be drawn from this: some enterprising bee of the colony must have gone to another hive and either begged, borrowed, or stolen a worker-egg. Apiarian scientists very rightly hesitate to ascribe to the honey-bee surpassing ingenuity of this kind on the testimony of a single case, however well authenticated. But other instances are on record nearly as indubitable, and as it is an unquestioned fact that worker-bees will carry eggs about from comb to comb within the space of their own hive, it does not seem wholly incredible that they may visit other hives in the immediate neighbourhood, especially when impelled to extra resourcefulness by so vital a need. The whole question is interesting in more ways than one, as it seems to bear very trenchantly on the problem of “Reason versus Instinct,” now busy in the thoughts of most modern naturalists.

In whatever way the egg for the queen-cell may be furnished by the stock intending to raise a new mother-bee, the first sign of life is always the same—a tiny, white, elongated speck, glued on end to the base, or what must rather be called the roof, of the inverted cell-cup. In this state it remains about three days, when the larva hatches out, and at once the special treatment accorded to the young queen begins. She is loaded with rich provender from the first moment of her existence, living literally up to the eyes in the white, shining, jelly-like substance that the nurse-bees are continually regurgitating and pouring into the cells. This superfeeding process is continued for about five days, when the larva has reached its full growth and the cell its greatest dimensions. The larva then stops feeding to spin itself a silken shroud before changing into the pupa state, and the bees seal up the door of the cell. In its completed state the cell loses its resemblance to an acorn, and is rather to be likened to a fir-cone. In the case of the common workers and drones, the cells are made of pure wax, only the capping being of mingled wax and pollen; but the queen cell is constructed throughout of this porous material.

The fully grown queen-bee is ready, and more than anxious to leave her cradle-cell in about fifteen or sixteen days after the laying of the egg. The bees, however, generally give her a first lesson in obedience even at this early point in her career. It is a critical time in the history of the hive, and much thought and care have been bestowed on the complicated business in hand. In the first place, it would never have done to allow the whole future welfare of the colony to depend on a single life alone. Therefore not one queen has been raised, but several. As many as five or six queens may be ready to hatch out in different parts of the brood-nest, and none of them will be permitted to break from her cell until the appointed time arrives. For each the cradle now becomes a prison. A small hole is bored in the cell-wall, through which the impatient captive is fed, pending the day when she is to be allowed her liberty; and close guard and watch is kept over each cell to save it from the violence of the old queen, who is becoming hourly more restless and suspicious.

The complete subjection of the mother-bee to the ruling worker-class in the hive receives here a striking confirmation. She is a true exemplar of a prevailing kind of femininity—comely of person, untutored in mind, an inveterate stay-at-home, a prolific mother; and now there awakens in her the sounding chord of jealousy. Left free to act on her own impulses, she would soon bring about a speedy end to all the careful, long-sighted preparations within the hive. She would tear open each royal cell, and with one thrust of the curved, cruel scimitar that queen-bees use only on their equals in rank, its occupant would be ruthlessly despatched, and her own supremacy reinstated. But an impassable barrier stops the way—the collective will of the hive. The violent delight of killing has once been hers; she will never know it again. Now her own fate is in the balance. It may be death, or a new life in a new home: all depends on the deliberate decree of those who have made her, and who now use or discard her, for their own purposes. If it be late spring, and the condition of the stock warrant it, this governing spirit may decide for colonisation, and the old queen may be disposed of by sending her off with a swarm. But other counsels may prevail. The times may be unripe, or the weather inopportune. And then Fate, in the shape of a merciless application of principles, will descend upon her, and her own wise children will ruthlessly put her to death.

This State-execution of the queen, at the first sign of waning fertility, is a peculiarly pathetic as well as a tragic phase of bee-life. The stern, soured amazons of the hive must have their systems and conventions in everything they undertake; and they cannot even bring about the supersession of the old queen without due circumstance and ceremonial. Given that it would be against the best interests of the common weal that she should retain her life after the loss of her queenhood, one swift stroke would immediately determine the matter, and the law—that there shall be no useless members in the bee-republic—would have its due fulfilment. But old tradition rules that the queen shall suffer no violence from the weapons of the common herd. She is to die, but her death must be brought about in another way. And so the fawning executioners gather round her, locking her in an embrace that tightens with every moment, until the breath is literally hugged out of her body. All her life has been spent in the midst of caresses, and now she is to die of them, close held to the last in that silent, terrible grip.