Part 15

Buffon did not share Maeterlinck's high opinion of the intelligence of the bee; he thought the dog, the monkey, and the majority of other animals possess far more; an opinion which I share. Indeed, of free intelligence the bee possesses very little. The slave of an overmastering instinct, as our new nature poet, McCarthy, says,

She makes of labor an eternal lust.

Bees do wonderful things, but do them blindly. They work as well (or better) in the darkness as in the light. The Spirit of the Hive knows and directs all. The unit is the swarm, and not the individual bee.

The bee does not know fear; she does not know love. She will defend the swarm with her life, but her fellows she heeds not.

It is very doubtful if the individual bees of the same hive recognize one another at all outside the hive. Every beehunter knows how the bees from the same tree will clip and strike at one another around his box, when they are first attracted to it. After they are seriously engaged in carrying away his honey, they pay no attention to one another or to bees from other swarms. That bees tell one another of the store of honey they have found is absurd. The unity of the swarm attends to that.

Maeterlinck tells of a little Italian bee that he once experimented upon during an afternoon, the results showing that this bee had told the news of her find to eighteen bees! Its "vocabulary" stood it in good stead!

Maeterlinck's conception of the Spirit of the Hive was an inspiration, and furnishes us with the key to all that happens in the hive. The secret of all its economies are in the phrase. Having hit upon this solution, he should have had the courage to stand by it. But he did not. He is continually forgetting it and applying to his problem the explanations we apply in our dealings with one another. He talks of the power of the bees to give "expression to their thoughts and feelings"; of their "vocabulary," phonetic and tactile; he says that the "extraordinary also has a name and place in their language"; that they are able to "communicate to each other news of an event occurring outside the hive"; all of which renders his Spirit of the Hive superfluous. He quotes from a French apiarist who says that the explorer of the dawn,--the early bee,--like the early bird that catches the worm, returns to the hive with the news that "the lime-trees are blooming to-day on the banks of the canal"; "the grass by the roadside is gay with white clover"; "the sage and the lotus are about to open"; "the mignonette and the lilies are overflowing with pollen." Whereupon the bees must organize quickly and arrange to divide the work. They probably call a council of the wise ones and after due discussion and formalities proceed to send out their working expeditions. "Five thousand of the sturdiest will sally forth to the lime-trees, while three thousand juniors go and refresh the white clover." "They make daily calculations as to the means of obtaining the greatest possible wealth of saccharine liquid."

When Maeterlinck speaks of "the hidden genius of the hive issuing its commands," or recognizes the existence among the bees of spiritual communications that go beyond a mere "yes" or "no," he is true to his own conception.

The division of labor among hive bees is of course spontaneous, like all their other economies--not a matter of thought, but of instinct.

Maeterlinck and other students of the honey bee make the mistake of humanizing the bee, thus making them communicate with one another as we communicate. Bees have a language, they say; they tell one another this and that; if one finds honey or good pasturage, she tells her sisters, and so on. This is all wide of the mark. There is nothing analogous to verbal communication among the insects. The unity of the swarm, or the Spirit of the Hive, does it all. Bees communicate and coöperate with one another as the cells of the body communicate and coöperate in building up the various organs. The spirit of the body coördinates all the different organs and tissues, making a unit of the body.

If some outside creature, such as a mouse or a snail, penetrates into the hive, and dies there, the bees encase it in wax, or bury it where it lies, so that it cannot contaminate the hive, and a foreign object in the body, such as a bullet in the lungs, or in the muscles, becomes encysted in an analogous manner, and is thus rendered harmless.

Kill a bee in or near the hive and the smell of its crushed body will infuriate the other bees. But crush a bee in the fields or by the bee-hunter's box which is swarming with bees, and the units from the same hive heed it not.

Bees have no fear. They have no love or attachment for one another as animals have. If one of their number is wounded or disabled, they ruthlessly expel it from the hive. In fact, they belong to another world of beings that is absolutely oblivious of the world of which we form a part. They murder or expel the drones, after they have done their work of fertilizing the queen, in the most cruel and summary manner. Their apparent attachment to the queen, and their loyalty to her, are not personal. They do not love her. It is the Spirit of the Hive, or the cult of the swarm solicitous about itself. There are no brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, among the bees; there are only co-workers, working not for the present, but for the future. When we enter the kingdom of the bee, we must leave all our human standards behind. These little people have no red blood, no organs of sense, as we have; they breathe and hear through their legs, their antennæ.

The drones do not know the queen as such in the hive. Their instincts lead them to search for her in the air during her nuptial flight, and they know her only there. The drones have thirteen thousand eyes, while the workers have only six thousand. This double measure of the power of vision is evidently to make sure that the males discover the queen in her course through the air.

The guards that take their stand at the gate, the bees that become fans at the entrance to ventilate the hive, the nurses, the bees that bring the bee-bread, the bees that pack it into the cells, the bees that go forth to find a home for the new swarm, the sweepers and cleaners of the hive, the workers that bring propolis to seal up the cracks and crevices--all act in obedience to the voiceless Spirit of the Hive.

After we have discounted Maeterlinck so far as the facts will bear us out in doing, it remains to be said that he is the philosopher of the insect world. If Fabre is the Homer, as he himself has said, Maeterlinck is the Plato of that realm. How wisely he speaks of the insect world in his latest volume, "Mountain Paths":

The insect does not belong to our world. The other animals, the plants even, notwithstanding their dumb life and the great secrets which they cherish, do not seem wholly foreign to us. In spite of all, we feel a certain earthly brotherhood with them. They often surprise and amaze our intelligence, but do not utterly upset it. There is something, on the other hand, about the insect that does not belong to the habits, the ethics, the psychology of our globe. One would be inclined to say that the insect comes from another planet, more monstrous, more energetic, more insane, more atrocious, more infernal than our own. One would think that it was born of some comet that had lost its course and died demented in space.

Speaking of the intelligence of bees reminds me of a well-known woodsman and camp-fire man who recently extolled in print the intelligence of hornets, saying that they have the ability to differentiate friends from foes. "They know us and we talk to them and they are made to feel as welcome as any of our guests." "When a stranger visits the camp, they attract the attention of one they know who recognizes their signal by thought or gesture and leaves immediately, returning only when the stranger has departed." (The italics are mine.) He says the same hornets apparently come to them year after year, greeting them on their arrival, and, should they be accompanied by strangers, they treat them with the same deference as "when they visit us after we have been in camp some time."

Did one ever hear before of such well-bred and well-mannered bees? What would Maeterlinck say to all that? Its absurdity becomes apparent when we remember that hornets live but a single season, that none of them lives over the winter, save the queen, and that she never leaves the nest in summer after she has got her family of workers around her.

III. ODD OR EVEN

One of our seven wise men once said to me, "Have you observed that in the inorganic world things go by even numbers, and in the organic world by odd?" I immediately went down to the edge of a bushy and swampy meadow below our camp and brought him a four-petaled flower of galium, and a plant-stalk with four leaves in a whorl. In another locality I might have brought him dwarf cornel, or the houstonia, or wood-sorrel, or the evening-primrose. Yet even numbers are certainly more suggestive of mechanics than of life, while odd numbers seem to go more with the freedom and irregularity of growing things.

One may make pretty positive assertions about non-living things. Crystals, so far as I know, are all even-sided, some are six and some eight-sided; snowflakes are of an infinite variety of pattern, but the number six rules them. In the world of living things we cannot be so sure of ourselves. Life introduces something indeterminate and incommensurable. It makes use of both odd and even, though undoubtedly odd numbers generally prevail. Leaves that are in lobes usually have three or five lobes. But the stems of the mints are four-square, and the cells of the honey bee are six-sided. We have five fingers and five toes, though only four limbs. Locomotion is mechanical and even numbers serve better than odd. Hence the six-legged insects. In the inorganic world things attain a stable equilibrium, but in the living world the equilibrium is never stable. Things are not stereotyped, hence the danger of dogmatizing about living things. Growing Nature will not be driven into a corner.

Well may Emerson ask--

Why Nature loves the number five, And why the star form she repeats?

The number five rules in all the largest floral families, as in the crowfoot family, the rose family (which embraces all our fruit trees), the geranium family, the flax family, the campanula family, the convolvulus family, the nightshade family. Then there is a large number of flowers the parts of which go in threes, one of the best known of which is the trillium. In animal life the starfish is the only form I recall based on the number five.

IV. WHY AND HOW

One may always expect in living nature variations and modifications. It is useless to ask why. Nature is silent when interrogated in this way. Ask her how, and you get some results. If we ask, for instance, why the sting of the honey bee is barbed, and those of the hornet and wasp and bumble-bee, and of other wild bees, are smooth like a needle, so that they can sting and sting again, and live to sting another day, while the honey bee stings once at the cost of its life; or why only one species of fish can fly; or why one kind of eel has a powerful electric battery; or why the porcupine has an armor of quills while his brother rodent the woodchuck has only fur and hair, and so on--we make no addition to our knowledge.

But if we ask, for instance, how so timid and defenseless an animal as the rabbit manages to survive and multiply, we extend our knowledge of natural history. The rabbit prospers by reason of its wakefulness--by never closing its eyes--and by its speed; also by making its home where it can command all approaches, and so flee in any direction. Or if we ask how our ruffed grouse survives and prospers in a climate where its cousin the quail perishes, we learn that it eats the buds of certain trees, while the quail is a ground-feeder and is often cut off by a deep fall of snow.