CHAPTER IX. The Sovereign Worker-Bee

THE SOVEREIGN WORKER-BEE

WATCHING the inner life of the hive in the season of its full activity, it is not the untiring spirit of industry pervading the whole bee-commonwealth that most excites the student’s wonder, but rather the fact that this ceaseless diligence finds so many outlets—that so many different kinds of necessary work are going forward at one and the same time.

Between the brood-combs the nurses are feeding the young larvæ, or clearing out the empty cells, or sealing over the full-grown nymphs for their pre-natal slumber. Hard by, the sowers are at their vital work, driving their living seed-barrow, the queen, over the combs. Elsewhere the wax-makers hang in a silent, densely packed cluster. Overhead, the new honey-combs are growing; the masons building up the cell-walls, while the engineers devise means and ends, calculate strains, put in a strut here, a stay there, or flying buttress from one comb to another, or cut new passageways where the traffic seems too congested for the old thoroughfares of the hive.

On all sides the scavenging bees go to and fro, picking up every particle of refuse, and carrying it safely away. Winged undertakers drive their trade in the midst of the throng, bearing the corpses of their comrades, old and young, towards the entrance, and flying away with them into the sunlight of the young spring day. There is the ventilating army outside the city gates, skilfully organised in relays, so that, day and night, a constant circulation of air is maintained. There are the guard-bees close by, watching all in-comers and out-goers. There is a sort of General Purposes Committee ready outside the threshold with a helping hand for all: succouring the overladen, grooming down any in need of such assistance, gathering up fallen treasure, or, as it would seem, taking careful note of the weather for their next official report. And all through the hours of sunshine, in unnumbered thousands, the foragers are charging to and fro, some bringing nectar, some staggering in under mighty loads of pollen, others with full water-sacs, still more dragging behind them lumps of the curious cement called by the ancients Propolis, and used for so many different purposes in the daily work of the hive.

And it all goes on with the regularity of a well ordered human settlement. There is complexity, yet no confusion; there is speed without hurry Each busy gang of labourers has apparently a distinct and definite task allotted to it by the central hive-authority; co-operation and progress are, to all appearances, deified cause and effect in all the affairs of the hive.

It is easy—nay, inevitable—in any close study of bee-life with the help of the modern observation-hive, to overset the ancient idea of absolute bee-monarchy under a single king or queen. But it is not so easy to determine how the general government of the colony is actually carried on. Innumerable small consultations on minor matters are seen to take place on every side during each moment of the busy day; but nothing like general communication is ever visible. And yet, how are the great national movements, such as the despatch of a swarm or the supersedure of an old queen, brought about; how are the various common crises of the State met, and provided for? The only rational inference seems to be that each worker is in herself the perfect evolved presentment of republicanism, in whom all imaginable difficulties in collective life have their best solution, tried and proved through the ages, and resorted to unerringly as a matter of course. Thus a common need is felt, and met instantaneously by a common, recognised expedient. The judgment of one is necessarily the judgment of all. Every problem of daily life, however intricate, is solved by the one device, brought to the fine point of perfection through the experience of countless generations, and applied by each individual to the common want, just as hunger impels all mankind to eat.

Such a condition of affairs, even in a community of human beings, would imply a very high state of mental, if not of moral, development in the individual. It would mean entire negation of self in the interest of the common good. Even with all the forces of heredity at work, it would need stern ascetic training for the young, and for the transgressing adult a swift and merciless retribution, if the last dream of communism—the abolition of all law and penalty, and the establishment of a natural autonomy of well-doing—were ever to be realised in fact. And yet some such state of things appears to exist in the bee-commonwealth: the individual worker-bee seems to be the product of some such system carried on through an indefinite space of time. Order is preserved, public works go diligently forward, the clock of the national progress keeps time to the second, not because there is a central wisdom-force to plan, to govern, to awe recalcitrants, but because every worker-bee is herself the State in miniature, all propensities alien to the pure collective spirit having been long ago bred out of her by the sheer necessities of her case.

The worker-bee, as we see her in the hive to-day, although evolution must have been busy through the ages determining her present mind-power and bodily conformation, is nevertheless as much a product of direct artifice as she is of original nature. We have seen how the egg containing the feminine germ, if given full scope and opportunity, develops into what may be taken as the complete aboriginal type of female bee, differing from the worker in a dozen essential ways. The queen also is probably, in one respect at least—her amazing fecundity—a deliberate creation of the hive-people, as her over-production is brought about by over-stimulation to meet an artificial state of affairs. Left to herself, under pristine conditions, she would certainly lay on a much more moderate scale. But the worker-bee owes her unique structure and mental constitution almost entirely to the intervention of her nurses from the moment of the hatching of the egg. Careful experiment has proved that the queen-larva and the worker-larva are identical up to the third day of their life in the cell, except that the queen has made more rapid growth owing to more generous and more ample fare. After the third day, the genital system of each larva will begin to develop, if this rich nitrogenous diet is maintained. In the case of the queen, this pre-digested food, well called bee-milk, is lavished on the favoured grub up to the last moment of its larval existence, no other food being given. But in the case of the worker-grub, not only has its supply of bee-milk been restricted in both quantity and quality from the day of its birth, but now—just before the development of the ovaries might be expected—an important change is made. The allowance of bee milk is greatly reduced, while plain honey is given in addition, but on the same parsimonious scale, to the end of its five days’ larval life.

What other influences, if any, are brought to bear on the young worker-bee at this portentous stage of her career, it is impossible to say. But at least the change in the food is well ascertained, and the results—whether of this alone, or in combination with other treatment—are more than astounding. Not only is the development of the sex-organs so completely arrested that hardly a trace of them can be discovered in the adult worker-bee, but, from that moment, the larva seems to become an essentially different creature, reflecting more and more the attributes of her nurses, and showing wider and wider departure from those of the mother-bee. As soon as the worker changes into the pupa state, organs appear of which the queen has not the faintest rudiments. She receives her special equipment for field-work in a pair of baskets for carrying pollen. Her tongue is lengthened, so that it may reach the nectar hidden deep down in the clover-bells. She is to become a builder, and therefore is provided with half a dozen crucibles wherein to prepare the wax. Her useless ovipositor is changed into a weapon: it is straightened, shortened; the barbs upon it are multiplied and strengthened; a gland, with which it is furnished, and which, in the queen, contains an all but harmless fluid, is now filled with an active poison. Above all, she develops a brain-power far in excess of that of the normal female bee, her mother; and she acquires a whole new set of impulses and aspirations from beginning to end.

While the queen-bee’s natural element is the obscurity of the hive, and she would seem both to hate and fear the sunshine, the worker is essentially an outdoor creature, revelling in the light and air. While the queen, though obedient to the destiny that has made her over-fruitful, displays nevertheless not the slightest joy of motherhood nor interest in her children, the worker, doomed to eternal spinsterhood, yet constitutes herself the true mother and nurse and instructress of all the young in the hive. And the price exacted for the authority and power which she usurps, or was usurped for her by those remote ancestors of hers who first invented the sexless honey-bee, must be paid in the hardest coin—that of life itself. Instead of the years that nature allotted to her kind in the beginning, she is to endure hardly as many months. Destiny, and her own vaulting ambitions, have given her too arduous a part to play. Her stunted, yet over-elaborated body and over-developed brain, cannot long hold out against the wear and tear of the life she is born to. At best a few months see her dead at her work, or using the last pulsations of her worn-out, ragged wings to carry her away to the traditional burial-place of the hive; or her end may be to fall under the stroke of the State executioners. For the old-age problem has long ago discovered its effective solution in the bee-republic. Justice that is capable of being tempered with mercy carries its own mark of imperfection indelibly upon it. When the principle of all for the common good has been driven to its last resort in logic, mercy to the individual can only be another name for robbing Peter to pay Paul. In bee-communism the sole title to life is utility, and so the old worn-out, useless workers must go.

The development of the worker-egg through its various stages of growth, until the perfectly formed insect emerges from the cell, makes a curious study. The egg itself is remarkable, for it is covered with an hexagonal pattern. The large compound eyes of the fully grown bee also show this form. Each eye consists of about four thousand separate lenses, and each lens is a regular hexagon. Wonder has often been expressed at the ingenuity of the comb-builders in making the cells six-sided, and thus crowding into a given space more compartments than could be secured by the same amount of material wrought into any other shape. The ancient writers explained this choice of the hexagonal cell by the supposed fact that the six legs of the bee were simultaneously employed in comb-building, each leg constructing its own portion of the cell. A more modern idea is that the particular shape of the cell is accidental, or rather the outcome of compelling circumstance, mutual pressure causing the cells to assume the hexagonal form.

Now, it is quite true that soaked peas in a bottle will take this shape in swelling, but the analogy will not hold good in respect of comb-building. In the work of the bees there is no pressure or constriction of any kind. Each cell is made separately, being joined on to those above it; and the comb expands steadily downward and sideways through an empty space until the desired limit is reached. A much more probable explanation of the hexagonal form of the cell is that it was arrived at by experience. The first combs may have been built with round cells, the interstices being filled in with wax. But the bee, who is an expert in the science of economy, would quickly see the disadvantage of this plan. And with the hexagonal principle, an old familiar thing in the hive—witness the pattern on the egg-surfaces, and the compound eye-construction—it would not be long before she hit upon the better, more scientific way.

There is, however, another reason, and almost as potent a one, for the adoption of the six-sided cell both for brood-raising and the storing of honey. It must be remembered that the present system of vertical walls parallel and close together, made up of numberless small horizontal chambers placed back to back, is not an ideal arrangement either for the raising of the young or the storing of food. Yet it is the best possible contrivance under the circumstances, which are forced upon the bee by the necessity of leading a close, crowded, communal life. Air is a prime need for all operations in the hive, but for none more than the development of the young bees. When a queen is to be raised, a full supply of fresh air is given her, but only at the expense of valuable space. With the common kind, of which perhaps ten or fifteen thousand may be maturing in the brood-nest at one and the same time, it is obviously impossible to make any such concession. The young worker- or drone-larva must secure what air it can through the narrow cell-top. Now, the bee breathes at all stages of its career not through the mouth, but by means of air-holes or spiracles in the sides of its body. If the cell were round, the larva, when fairly grown, would fill the space, and the air would reach the spiracles only with difficulty. But, no matter what the size of the young grub may be, the angles of the hexagon cell are never quite filled. They form half a dozen by-passes for the air, arranged on all sides, and extending right to the base of the cell; and thus the larva has the full benefit of the available air-supply, even though it be necessarily scanty.

With the store-combs the six angles of the cell fulfil an equally important office. The ideal honey-cell would be one with its mouth opening upwards, so that it could be filled in an ordinary rational way. But under the strict economical principles ruling in the hive such an arrangement would be impracticable. The honey-vats must be stacked one over the other in a horizontal position, and therefore must be chargeable from the end. All cells in the comb have a slight upward tilt, but not enough to retain the fluid contents if the cell were a round one. The effect of the angles in the hexagon is to increase the retentive property of the cell, and experience has taught the bees how to supplement this natural holding power of the angles by just that slight cant of the cell which is necessary to prevent the nectar running out.

The worker-bee, during her period of larval life, at first lies coiled up at the bottom of the cell, but as her size increases she takes up a position lengthways, with her head towards the cell-mouth. This, however, is not a constant attitude, for she seems at intervals to make a series of slow gyrations or somersaults, probably to facilitate the casting of her skin, which she accomplishes several times during her five days’ life as a grub. At the end of this time the nurse-bees stop the feeding process and seal up the cell. Now the larva sets to work, first to spin herself a silken shroud before entering on her long sleep as a chrysalis, and then to change her skin for the last time. In the case of the worker these fine-wrought sleeping-clothes envelop her whole body, forming a continuous cocoon. But the queen-larva weaves herself only a scanty sort of cloak, covering her head and thorax, but leaving her nether portions bare. The theory usually advanced in explanation of this is, that when the surplus queens are slaughtered in their cells by the accepted mother-bee after her fertilisation, the fell work is rendered easier by the absence of the tough material of the cocoon over the parts generally attacked. It seems to be well substantiated that in a battle of queens the stings are not used haphazard, as with the workers, but each queen tries to thrust her weapon into one of her enemy’s spiracles or breathing-holes, of which she possesses fourteen, seven on each side. And a stroke dealt in this way appears to be always fatal.

But, in all likelihood, the true reason why the queen sleeps in a short gown made of tough, coarse fibre must be looked for somewhere back in the old ancestral history of the honey-bee. It is probably safe to consider the complete worker cocoon as a comparatively recent introduction, evolved to meet some necessity arising since the bee-people became a civilised race. But what its true origin was appears to be out of the reach of all conjecture. A curious fact is that these cocoons are never removed from the cell. They remain fixed to its sides throughout, and though the cell is otherwise carefully cleaned after the young bee has vacated it, the cocoon is never interfered with, but continues as a permanent lining to the cell. The same thing occurs with all successive generations, each bee leaving her swaddling-clothes behind her, until so great an accumulation occurs that the cell becomes too small for breeding any but a puny, undersized race. With wild bees, where the nest has been constructed in a tree-hollow, and there is usually plenty of surplus room, the old brood-combs may be eventually abandoned and fresh ones built farther on. Thus the stock generally shifts its station from year to year. These natural bee-nests, or bee-bikes, as country people call them, often reach a great age. Sometimes a swarm will get under the rafters in a house-roof, and may be left undisturbed for generations. In one case bees were traditionally supposed to have inhabited a blind loft in a farmhouse continuously for forty or fifty years. A legend rife in the village credited them with having stored many tons of honey, but when the stock was sulphured little more than a vast accumulation of comb was discovered. This comb was of all ages, from a few weeks old to an unconjecturable number of years. Much of it was perfectly black, and the cells choked up with pupa cocoons.

The fact that egg-laying is continued in these combs where others are not available, even though the capacity of the cells has been greatly reduced, seems to cast an added doubt on the theory that the size of the cell is responsible for the fertilisation or non-fertilisation of the egg as it is deposited by the queen. Very old drone-comb is sometimes found in use for breeding purposes where the cells have become no larger than those used for normal worker-brood. And yet the queen continues to lay in them unimpregnated eggs. The whole question is still hedged round with difficulties.

The young worker-bee, at the end of about three weeks from its first inception, breaks from its chrysalis-skin, and begins to gnaw its way through the cell-cover. The pollen, which is combined with the wax to form this capping, discharges a double office. It makes the wax porous for the admittance of air, and it renders the cell-cover edible, thus causing the young bee to effect its own release through the promptings of its appetite. The new-born worker, although fully grown, is a weak, greyish-hued, flaccid creature for some time after it leaves its cradle. Its earliest impulse seems to be to groom itself, and then to wander about on a tour of inspection of its as yet narrow world of gloom and noise and bustle. For the first day or two it does little else than crawl about unnoticed in the busy throng, gradually gaining strength and rigidity of limb.

On the second day it may be seen dipping into the open honey-vats and pollen-bins, of which a few are always scattered here and there among the brood-cells. After this it seems to waken in earnest to its duties and responsibilities, and takes its place among the nurse-bees, setting to work with the rest in the stupendous task of feeding the larvæ.

In the ordinary course, the young worker-bee will not leave the hive for about a fortnight after its emergence from the cell. In the interval, however, it has a whole policy of life to study, and several trades to learn. All the indoor work of the hive appears to be done by the young bees during these first weeks of their existence. On them the whole care and sustenance of the young brood depend. They produce the wax, and build the combs; they look after the order and cleanliness of the hive; they are the brewers of the honey, and the keepers of the stores; they feed the queen-bee on her ceaseless rounds, and also give the drones their daily rations of bee-milk, for it is certain that the male bees depend very largely on the workers in this way, drawing only a part of their diet from the common stores. The old bees are the foragers; but it is probable they are met by the younger ones soon after their return to the hive, and their burden of nectar, being regurgitated, is transferred to the pouches of the young bees, by whom it is carried to the store-combs in the upper regions of the hive. At least, if the storage-chamber of a hive be opened during the busy part of the day, hardly any old bees will be seen among the crowd, which is industriously filling the cells with the new-gathered sweets.

It is not until the beginning of the second week of their life that the young bees make their first essay in the open air, and then it is only for a few minutes during the hottest part of the day. This sudden midday uproar is a familiar experience to the bee-keeper during the late spring and summer; and although the drones at first contribute largely to the chorus, they soon fly away, while the singing cloud of bees which remains enveloping every hive at this time, is entirely composed of the young house-bees taking their daily brief allowance of exercise and air.

It is found that the glands necessary for the production of the brood-food, as also the wax-generating organs, are largely developed in bees only a few weeks old, while, after their first month of life is over, these organs are greatly reduced. The bee generally begins outdoor work as a forager soon after she has reached the age of fourteen days. It is, however, probably a week or two longer before she attempts the more serious business of nectar-gathering. Nearly all the pollen-bearers are bees in their first young strength and vigour, and therefore peculiarly adapted to the carrying of heavy burdens. But as soon as the worker-bee has settled down to the great paramount task of honey-getting, she seems to leave the pollen alone. Thus, in a normal colony, the life of the honey-bee, short as it is, is carefully planned out from beginning to end, each period having its special task for which the age of the bee is peculiarly fitted. Yet this rule is no more absolute than any other of the ways of the hive. Where the community is short-handed, and there are not enough mature workers to gather stores, the young bees will be turned out to forage at a much earlier date in their career. In the same way, if a hive has been without a queen for some time, and therefore few young bees are available to care for the brood when the new mother-bee has at last established herself, many of the old workers will stay at home and busy themselves with the nursery-work, which in the ordinary course they would have long since relinquished.

There are many such instances of ingenious makeshift, or special adaptation, in the ways of the honey-bee. She is a creature full of resource on emergencies, but it is in the provision of desperate remedies for really desperate ills that she shines at her brightest. The prime disaster in bee-life is the loss of a queen at a time when it is impossible to appoint a successor. The standard of intelligence, as well as that of character, varies among bees almost as much as it does among men. Some colonies will work harder and for longer hours than the rest. Others will ease off when they have put by what they consider a sufficiency of stores, and an idle spirit spreads visibly among them. In a few cases there is a distinct moral twist in the national character, and the bees take to robbing their neighbours’ larders instead of working to furnish their own.

Permanent queenlessness is a calamity which affects different colonies in different ways. With some it means complete despair, a cessation of all enterprise or interest in life. Work is stopped; the guards are withdrawn from the gate; the community seems to give up in a body, and to await extinction with no more hope than a batch of criminals in the condemned cell. But with others the common disaster is but a signal for a universal quickening of wits, a furbishing-up of all possible and impossible resources. To bees of this temper we should look for such episodes as the egg-purloining to supply a queen-cell, which has been already dealt with. But for supreme ingenuity, even though it be the forlornest of forlorn hopes, perhaps there is nothing to equal a device sometimes resorted to in this last emergency.

Looking through a hive which is not only without a queen, but which is without any means of raising one, certain mysterious eggs are unexpectedly discovered. These eggs are obviously quite newly laid, but not in the orthodox way. A normal queen works consistently from cell to cell, over a fairly regular patch of comb, and deposits only one egg in each cell; but these eggs in the queenless hive have been laid in a curiously haphazard way. The eggs are straggled over the comb. Two or three cells have been furnished at one spot and a few more at another, without the slightest attempt at the usual order and system. Moreover, some cells contain single eggs, but others two, or even three, apiece. It looks as if some demented mother-bee from another hive had caught her keepers napping, and had made surreptitious excursion into the queenless stock. But the most careful search through the hive will reveal no queen, nor is one to be found. The explanation of the vagary is that one of the workers has, in some extraordinary way, succeeded in rousing her atrophied nature, and has become capable of laying eggs. Yet the doom of the colony is not delayed by this, but rather hastened; for these eggs will produce only drones, and thus still more useless mouths to feed. In one well-authenticated case, the bees of a queenless colony built a queen-cell, and actually transplanted to it one of these eggs laid by a fertile worker, a dead drone being afterwards found in the cell.

How the laying worker is produced under the spur of the national crisis can only be a matter for speculation, but probably the youngest bee of the colony is plied with the special food usually given to queens, and thus her generative faculties are, to a certain extent, developed.