CHAPTER VIII. The Bride-Widow

THE BRIDE-WIDOW

IN the heat and glow of the fine June morning you may see her, the young virgin queen, making ready for her nuptial flight.

At first she is all hesitancy; wandering to and fro amidst the crowd on the hive-threshold; coquetting with the sunshine; loath to return to the dim, pent, murmurous twilight she has forsaken, yet hardly daring to launch herself on wings that are still untried.

For three long days and nights since her release from the prison-cell she has been a curiously solitary figure in the busy throng within the hive. Instead of the enthusiastic, welcoming world she expected, she finds none but unregarding strangers about her. Not a drone glances her way, and the worker-bees go upon their business in seeming unconcern at her presence. They do not even trouble themselves to feed her, and she is left to forage for herself as best she may. A conspiracy of indifference is on the clan—all part of a deep design for her education, if she only knew it, but singularly damping to the ardours, and great ideas of destiny, that gather within her day by day. At length the call comes for which all are secretly waiting, and obeying irresistibly, she presses out into the light.

As she stands hesitating, the hot June sun falls upon her, laving her in molten gold. The blue sky beckons her upward. All the world of colour and incense and life calls her to her wooing, and she must needs obey. With a little glad flutter of the wings, she breaks at last from the scrambling company about her, and soars up into the light.

Warily now she hovers, taking careful stock of her home and its surroundings. Then round and round, in ever widening and lifting circles, each sweep upward giving her a broader view of the world that lies beyond. And then away into the blue sky so swiftly that no human eye can follow; yet only for a short flight. She is back again now, almost before you have missed her, and hurrying, frightened at her own audacity, into the old safe gloom of the hive.

Thus she dallies, to and fro between the sunshine and the darkness, each time adventuring a little farther into the blue playground of the upper air, until at length the inevitable comes to pass. A great drone—one of the roistering crowd that fills the bee-garden with its hoarse noontide music—spies her, and gives instant chase. At sight of him she wheels, and darts away into the sunshine at lightning speed. Yet the first drone has hardly stretched a wing before another is after him, and still another. Thick and fast from all points they gather for the race, until the fleeing queen has drawn a whole bevy of them, streaming like a little grey cloud behind her. This much you can see as you strain your eyes in their track; but in a moment quarry and huntsmen have vanished together, volleying, as it seemed, straight up into the farthermost skies.

From her birth to the day when that terrible, living cordon closes about her, almost the whole life of the queen-bee can be followed step by step. Only this one moment of her bridal stands unrevealed, and perhaps for ever unrevealable, to human eyes. You can picture to yourself the wild chevy-chase through the clear June air and sunshine; you can give, in fancy, the prize to the strongest and the fleetest; but all you will know for certain is that in a little while the queen returns to the hive, sobered and solitary, trailing behind her infallible evidence of her impregnation and the death of the victorious drone. She has been the bride of a moment; now she is to be the widow of a lifetime. Henceforward her days are to be spent in the twilight cloisters of the hive, flying abroad so rarely that many an old experienced beeman will say she comes forth only once a year when she leads a swarm. But in her body now she carries the seed from which will spring up a whole nation. Before her marriage-flight she was the least considered of all the colony; now she is welcomed home with public ovation; lauded, fed, and fondled; set up in the high place, a living symbol of the tens of thousands unborn. As in olden, savage times, the royal festivals had their human sacrifices, so this paramount day in the perfected communism of the bee-people must vent its rejoicing in slaughter. But it is not tribute of common slaves that is now to redden the State-shambles, nor will the work fall to the common executioner’s knife. There are captive queens in the citadel—a royal sacrifice ready to hand, and a royal blade hungering for the task. Once the queen has proved her intrinsic motherhood, and the first few worker-eggs have been laid in the comb, the guards will stand away from the royal prison-cells and let her wreak her will upon them. It is all very ghastly in a miniature way, yet very queenly, as old traditions of human queenhood go. She gives over her nursery-work gladly enough for a moment, and flies to the slaughter, tearing down the prison-doors, and putting each clamorous captive fiercely to the sword.

Apart from this tragic element of sororicide, quickly over and soon forgotten in the general rejoicing, there is true romance in the early life-story of the Queen of the Bees—bridehood, wifehood, widowhood, following hard upon each other, all in the space of a single hour. But in the details of her common everyday life that succeed this tense period, above all in the wonderful structure of her body and its functions, there is greater romance still. That she has but a single commerce with the drone, and thereafter is exalted to perpetual fecundity; that, through her, sons and daughters can be given to the hive in just the proportion needed for the good of the State, or that increase of population can be wholly arrested at will, are facts to be accredited only after sure knowledge. And to understand how these results are brought about, it is necessary to learn something of the anatomy, as well as the manner of fecundation, of the mother-bee.

In the first place, as fertilisation of the one sex by the other is usually regarded, the queen-bee is not fertilised at all. The vital essence of the drone does not penetrate the ovaries of the queen, but passes immediately after coition into a receptacle specially provided for it, where it is stored, and its effectiveness preserved, during nearly the whole lifetime of the queen. It has been shown that the virgin queen is able to lay eggs from which only drones, or male bees, originate. The fecundated queen, however, can lay both male and female eggs, and she has the power of depositing either kind when and wherever she wills. The whole thing, amazing as it is, and far-reaching in its results, has, like many other extraordinary devices in nature, a simple explanation. The gland wherein is stored the male life-essence, can be opened or closed at the will of the mother-bee, or rather, as will be shown, according to circumstances that for the moment involuntarily but inexorably guide her. When she is brought to the large drone-cell, this gland remains shut, and the egg escapes without contact with its contents. But at the narrow worker-cells the gland in the oviduct is opened, and the egg, in passing, absorbs some of its containing germs. Thus only the female bee is born of the union of the two parents; the male bee is the offspring of mother alone.

Of this primal incident, the parthenogenesis, or birth of the fully equipped male from the virgin female, little more can be said than that it is a well-ascertained fact of nature, exemplified in several other insects beside the honey-bee. But while we are witnessing the part played in the hive by the fecundated queen, with her elaborate organism, much is to be noted; and here we really get the master-key to a right understanding of the whole system of bee-government. It would be an anomaly if the highest, most important functions of the State had been entrusted solely to the queen, whose feeble intelligence renders her, of all others, least likely to execute them properly; and we find, in fact, that no such reliance is placed on her. The worker-bees, who take her in charge on her return from her mating-flight, henceforth originate her every act and impulse. It has already been seen how she is led from cell to cell over the combs; how she is caused to lay, in earliest spring, only a few eggs a day, while in the summer she may produce several thousand; and how her output may be checked or augmented at any point between. Now we are to realise how it is all brought about; or, at least, bring conjecture as near to certainty as may be with so difficult a theme.

During the first two days of her life as a perfect insect, we saw the young virgin queen mingling with the throng in the hive almost unnoticed, and left to seek her own food from the common store like the rest. But now that her fecundation has been achieved, she has a whole suite of chamber-women, whose principal duty is to attend to her nourishment. From their mouths they feed her, giving her, in all probability, the same rich substance that was administered to her when but a larva in the cell. This bee-milk consists mainly of honey and pollen pre-digested, but it has been proved that its composition can be altered at will by the ministering bees. Additions to it are made, either separately, or combined in varying proportions, from three or four distinct glands, each of which exudes a liquid differing in nature from that of the rest. The particular kind of nourishment given to a queen who is to be urged on in the work of egg-laying, has the effect of stimulating her ovaries. The more food of this kind she receives, the greater will be her prolificacy. On the other hand, a diminishing allowance will mean a corresponding decrease in her egg-laying powers; while, if this rich diet be withheld altogether, and she is forced to help herself from the honey-cells, the development of these eggs may cease entirely, as it actually does in the coldest time of the year. Thus the bees play upon her, producing just the music needed for their purposes. As the days lengthen, and the spring sun gets higher and warmer, they gradually waken her docile nature to its one paramount task. In the flaming weeks of summer she sits at an unending banquet. And when autumn comes, with its chilly nights and steadily failing sun-glow, the generous fare is slowly withdrawn; her retinue thins and disperses; at length she becomes a solitary, unmarked wanderer again, sipping, with the commonest worker, at the plain household sweets.

How the proportion of the sexes is so unerringly regulated by the hive-authorities through their influence on the mother-bee, is not so readily explained; nor can it be at present more than shrewd conjecture, a backward reckoning from effect to cause. Probably the opening or closing of the fertilising gland, which decides the sex of the egg, is automatic, the attitude of the mother-bee during oviposition determining its action. When she enters the narrow worker-cells, her body is necessarily straightened, and this may produce pressure on the fecundating gland, resulting in the impregnation of the egg. But in the wider drone-cell no such constricted posture is needful, and the egg may therefore pass untouched by the fructifying germ. If this version of the matter be accepted, the natural inference is that either the mother-bee is incapable of laying female eggs in the cells specially constructed for raising queens—these being the largest of all,—or that there is something in the peculiar curve of the cell-cup which compels her to straighten her body in the act, and so brings about the same posture as with the narrow worker-cells.

This theory, although at present the most plausible, has received, it is true, little confirmation in fact. No one, apparently, has ever seen the mother-bee lay in a queen-cell, nor has the transportation thither of a worker-egg by the bees actually been witnessed. To cling to the old idea of the supremacy of the queen-bee, giving her the power and ability of a despotic, all-wise sovereign, would, of course, set this and many other vexed questions at rest. Nothing, however marvellous, would be too much to expect of her. But the farther the student of bee-life goes in his absorbing subject, the more impossible the old notion seems. Proof comes to him with every hour that the mother-bee is virtually a servant, and never a ruler in the hive; and just as assured testimony reaches him of the universal potency of the worker-bees. All else that takes place within the hive is brought about by their collective will and agency; and it would be strange indeed if this vital matter of progeneration were not subject to the same controlling force.