Students of old books on the honey-bee are generally struck with two very remarkable characteristics about them—their invariable fine old classic and romantic flavour, and their ingenious leavening of a great mass of quite obvious fable by a very small modicum of enduring fact.
It is difficult to realise, until one has delved deep into these curious old records, how completely they are dyed through and through with the picturesque, but mainly erroneous, ideas of the ancient classic bee-fathers. The writers were, almost without exception, earnest, practical men, whose chief interest in life was the study and pursuit of their craft. But they seem, one and all, to have laboured under the idea that it was their bounden duty to uphold everything written about bees by the old Greek and Roman litterati, and that it would be the rankest heresy to advance any new truth, garnered from their individual experience, unless it could be supported by ample testimony from the same infallible source.
They seemed to look upon the works of Aristotle, Virgil, Pliny, and the rest, as so many divine revelations of the mystery of bee-craft, all-sufficing, finitely perfect; and they continually quoted from them in support of their own contentions, or in refutation of the statements of others, much as teachers of religion refer doubters to Bible texts. The bee-masters of the Middle Ages were, however, not alone in adopting this peculiar attitude of mind. It seems to have been the prevailing habit of the time with all classes. One might almost be justified in concluding that the study of nature in those days had no other object with these inveterate old classicians but to support what had already been set down by their revered oracles. It was enough that a thing had been written in Greek or Latin in the literary youth of the world; it was immaculate—the first and last word on the question; and if their personal observations seemed at variance with any statement of the old-world writers, then the contradiction was only an apparent one, and could, no doubt, be easily resolved by a more learned exponent of these bee-scriptures of ancient days.
It is certainly, at first glance, a matter for wonder that men could pass their whole lives in the pursuit of the craft, and yet manage to preserve uncorrupted a faith which seems so readily, and at so many points, assailable. But it must be remembered that any observation of the inner life of the honey-bee was then an extremely difficult thing. It was next to impossible to see anything that was going on inside the hives in use at that day. Pliny mentions a hive made of what he calls mirror-stone, which was probably talc, and through the transparent sides of which the working of the bees could be seen. But nothing of the kind seems to have been attempted among English bee-masters until the seventeenth century. Moreover, even if the whole hive had been made of clear glass, the observer would have been very little the wiser. He would have had the outer sides of the two end combs in view, and he would have seen much coming and going among the bees, with an occasional glimpse of the queen. But all the wonderful activity of the hive, so laboriously ascertained by latter-day observers, with the help of so many ingenious appliances, goes on entirely in the hidden recesses of the combs; and any attempt to study this life under the conditions appertaining in the Middle Ages would have been manifestly futile. It was not until Huber’s leaf-hive was invented—when it became to some extent possible to divide the combs for a short time without hopelessly disturbing the bees—that any real progress in bee-knowledge was made. The modern observation-hive, wherein the bees are compelled to build their combs between glass partitions, one over the other instead of side by side, was a still greater advance, and rendered the whole interior of the bee-dwelling available for study. But it is open to objection that bee-life in such a contrivance is carried on under too artificial conditions. In a natural bee-nest, the combs are built roughly side by side, and the brood is reared in the centre area of each comb, the surface covered by the breeding-cells diminishing outwards in each direction. Thus the brood-nest takes a globular form, with the honey-stores above and around it; and this natural arrangement is inevitably destroyed in a hive where the combs are superimposed and not collateral.
In the face, therefore, of the practical impossibility of learning anything about bees when they were housed in the usual straw-skep, the old bee-masters confined themselves to a repetition of the beliefs of the ancient writers, deftly interwoven with speculations of their own, which, as no one was in a position to refute them, were advanced with all the more daring and assurance.
They seem to have been, in the main, agreed on the point that the ordinary generative principle, otherwise universal throughout creation, was miraculously dispensed with in the single case of the honey-bee. Moses Rusden, who was bee-master to King Charles the Second, and who published his “Further Discovery of Bees” so late as the year 1679, believed that the worker-bees gathered from the flowers not only the germs of life, but the actual corporeal substance, of the young bees.
He pointed triumphantly to the little globular lumps of many-coloured pollen which bees so industriously fetch into the hives during the breeding-season, and asserted that these were the actual bodily matter from which the young bees developed. He also maintained that every hive was ruled over by a king, but here Rusden was evidently trying to serve two masters. No doubt he was a true “Abhorrer,” and heartily detested anything at variance with the doctrine of the divine right of monarchs. He had faithfully copied from Virgil as to the gathering of this generative substance from the flowers; but he felt that, as the King’s Bee-Master, it was incumbent on him to put in a good word for the restored monarchy if he could. There were still many in the realm who were altogether opposed to the Restoration, and probably more who were waverers between the faiths. And Rusden, doubtless, saw that if he could point to any parallel instance in Nature where the system of monarchy was the divinely ordained state, he would be furnishing his patron with a magnificent argument in favour of his kingship, and one, moreover, which would especially appeal to the ignorant and superstitious masses. No doubt, however, in taking up this position, Rusden was only echoing the belief immemorially established among the beemen of the past.
The single large bee, which all knew to exist in each hive, was generally looked upon as the absolute ruler of the community. It is variously described as a king or queen by writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, but only in the sense of a governor; and the word chosen largely depended on the sex of the august person who happened to occupy the English throne at the time. Thus Rusden very wisely discarded the notion of a queen-bee when he had to deal with Charles the Second. Butler, perhaps the most learned of the mediæval writers on the honey-bee, as astutely forbore to mention the word king, his book being published in the reign of Queen Anne. He calls it “The Feminine Monarchie,” but seems to have no more suspected the truth that the large bee was really the mother of the whole colony than any of his predecessors. Almost alone in his day, however, he refuses to accept the flower theory of bee-generation, and asserts that the worker-bees and drones are the females and males respectively. But, he says, they “engender not as other living creatures; onely they suffer their Drones among them for a season, by whose Masculine virtue they strangely conceive and breed for the preservation of their sweet kinde.” He gets over the difficulty of there being no drones in the hive for nine months in the year, during part of which time breeding goes actively forward, by asserting that the worker-bees immaculately conceive of the drones for the season, their summer impregnation sufficing until the drones reappear in the May of the following year. Thus, without guessing it, he was very near the discovery of one of the most astounding facts in Nature—that the queen-bee of a hive, after a single traffic with a drone, continues to produce fertile eggs for the rest of her life, which may extend to as long as three, or even four, years.
Butler’s book is rich in the quaint bee-lore of his times. He tells us the queen-bee has under her “subordinate Gouvernours and Leaders. For difference from the rest they beare for their crest a tuft or tossel, in some coloured yellow, in some murrey, in manner of a plume; whereof some turne downward like an Ostrich-feather, others stand upright like a Hern-top. In less than a quarter of an hour,” he assures us, “you may see three or foure of them come forth of a good stall; but chiefly in Gemini, before their continuall labour have worne these ornaments.” And any warm spring or summer morning, if you watch a hive of bees at work, you may chance upon much the same thing. In some flowers, notably the evening primrose, the pollen-grains have a way of clinging together in threads; and these festoons often catch in the antennæ of the foraging bees, giving much the same appearance of a plume, or tassel, as Butler saw in his day.
A page from Butler’s “Bees Madrigall” 1623
He gives some advice as to the deportment of a good bee-master which is well worth quoting. “If thou wilt have the favour of thy Bees that they sting thee not, thou must avoid such things as offend them: thou must not be unchaste or uncleanely: for impurity and sluttishnesse (themselves being most chaste and neat) they utterly abhore: thou must not come among them smelling of sweat, or having a stinking breath, caused either through eating of Leekes, Onions, Garleeke, and the like; or by any other meanes: the noisomenesse whereof is corrected with a cup of Beere: and therefore it is not good to come among them before you have drunke: thou must not be given to surfeiting and drunkennesse: thou must not come puffing and blowing unto them, neither hastily stir among them, nor violently defend thy selfe when they seeme to threaten thee; but softly moving thy hand before thy face, gently putting them by: and lastly, thou must be no Stranger unto them. In a word, thou must be chaste, cleanly, sweet, sober, quiet, and familiar: so will they love thee, and know thee from all other.” Thus, the good bee-master, according to Butler, is necessarily a compendium of all the virtues; and nothing more seems to be wanted to bring about the millennium than to induce all mankind to become keepers of bees.
Writers on the honey-bee in mediæval times vied with each other in their testimony to the extraordinary powers and intelligence of their hive-people. But perhaps a story, gravely related by Butler, outdoes them all. He prefaces it by declaring that “Bees are so wise and skilful, as not onely to discrie a certaine little God amightie, though he came among them in the likenesse of a Wafer-cake; but also to build him an artificial chappell.” He goes on to relate that “a certaine simple woman, having some stals of Bees that yeelded not unto hir hir desired profit, but did consume and die of the murraine; made hir mone to an other Woman more simple than hir selfe; who gave her counsell to get a consecrated Host, and put it among them. According to whose advice she went to the priest to receive the host: which when she had done, she kept it in hir mouth, and being come home againe she took it out, and put it into one of hir hives. Whereupon the murraine ceased, and the Honie abounded. The Woman, therefore, lifting up the Hive at the due time to take out the Honie, saw there (most strange to be seene) a Chappell built by the Bees, with an altar in it, the wals adorned by marvellous skill of Architecture, with windowes conveniently set in their places: also a doore and a steeple with bells. And the Host being laid upon the altar, the Bees making a sweet noise, flew around it.”
This story is only paralleled by another, equally ancient, wherein it is related that some thieves broke into a church, and stole the silver casket in which the holy wafers were kept. They found one wafer in the box, and this they hid under a hive before making off with the more intrinsically valuable part of their booty. In the night, it seems, the owner of the hive was awakened by the most ravishing strains of music, coming at set intervals from the direction of his bee-garden. He went out with a lantern to ascertain the cause of it, and discovered it to proceed from the interior of one of his hives. Full of perturbation at this miracle, he went and roused the Bishop, and acquainted him with the extraordinary state of affairs; and the Bishop coming with his retinue and lifting up the hive, they found that the bees had taken possession of the consecrated wafer, and placed it in the upper part of their hive, having first made for it a box of the whitest wax, an exact replica of the one stolen. And all around this box there were choirs of bees singing, and keeping watch over it, as monks do in their chapel. “With which story,” adds the narrator prophetically, “I doubt not but some incredulous people will quarrell.”
In their directions for hiving a swarm, the medieval bee-masters were always quaintly explicit. The dressing of the skep which was to receive the swarm was a particularly elaborate process. When the skep was new, you were recommended to scour it out with a handful of sweet herbs, such as thyme, marjoram, or hyssop; and this was to be followed by a second dressing of honey and water, or milk and salt. But the preparation of an old skep must have been a rather disgusting affair. You were to put “two or three handfuls of mault, or pease, or other come in the hive, and let a Hogge eat thereof. Meanwhile, doe you so turne the Hive, that the fome or froth, which the Hogge maketh in eating, may goe all about the Hive. And then wipe the Hive lightlie with a linnen cloth, and so will the Bees like this Hive better than the new.”
When the swarm was up, and “busie in their dance,” you were to “play them a fit of mirth on a Bason, Warming-pan, or Kettle, to make them more speedily light.” We are assured that the swarm would fly faster, or slower, according to the noise made. If the fit of mirth were in rapid measure, the bees would fly fast and high; but with a soft leisurely music, they would go slowly, and soon descend. This curious custom of “ringing the bees” is undoubtedly of Roman origin; but whether it was introduced by Cæsar’s followers, or those of Claudius in the first century, or whether the old English bee-masters themselves derived it from their classic reading, is hard to determine. It is still to be heard in many country districts, and its exponents seem to retain all the faith of their forefathers in its efficacy. Probably, in mediæval times, when bee-gardens were much more plentiful than they are now, the custom had at least one undeniable merit: it proclaimed to the various hive-owners in the vicinity that a swarm was in the air, and that its rightful owner was on the alert. In this way, no doubt, dishonest claims to its possession were largely prevented, or, at least, discouraged.
The question whether the noise made by ringing has any real effect on the swarming bees is still not absolutely decided. With the exception of the old skeppists, not a few of whom still exist in out-of-the-way rural corners, modern apiculturists have long discarded the custom as a gross superstition. But it has recently been suggested that the din made by old-fashioned bee-keepers when a swarm is up may have a real use after all. It is conjectured that the cloud of bees—which at first is nothing but a chaos of flashing wings, the whole contingent darting and whirling about indiscriminately over a large area together—is really dispersing in search of the queen. The suggestion put forward is that they follow her by ear, as she is supposed to utter a peculiar piping sound when flying. The din of the key and pan may, it is said, prevent the bees hearing this note and following her in her first erratic convolutions, and thus the swarm is more likely to pitch on a station near home. The theory is interesting, but hardly tenable. Old popular observances of this kind are seldom based on even the vaguest thread of fact, and it is much more probable that no effect whatever is produced on the bees by the ringing.
With regard to the right of a bee-keeper to follow his swarm into a neighbour’s land, it is interesting to have the assurance of one of these ancient writers that “if they will not be stayed, but, hasting on still, goe beyond your bounds; the ancient Law of Christendome permitteth you to pursue them whithersoever, for the recovery of your owne.” But, the writer adds, if your swarm goes so fast and so far that you lose sight and hearing of them, you also lose all right and property in them. In this case you have no legal alternative but to leave the bees to whomsoever may first find them. In view of recent disputes on this matter, wherein the law laid down appears to have been both vague and arbitrary, it is useful to be able to point to so ancient an authority in vindication of the bee-keeper’s rights.
There is hardly any detail in bee-government which had not its curious observance or superstition in mediæval times. One and all seemed to believe in the old Virgilian notion that bees carried about little stones to balance their flight during windy weather, and some even thought that flowers were carried about in the same way. Red-coloured clothing was supposed to be particularly offensive to bees, and one is warned not to venture near the apiary thus attired. In the hives the old bees and the young were believed to occupy separate quarters. In regard to this, it is a well-attested fact that, during the height of the honey season, the bees found in the upper stories of a hive are principally young ones who have not yet flown.
Rev. John Thorley writing his “Melissologia”
We are told that if any of the bees have not returned to the hive at the end of the day, the queen goes out to find them and show them the way back. No one need be in any fear of overlooking the ruler of the hive, because she can be known by her “lofty pace and countenance expressing Majesty, and she hath a white spot in her forehead glistering like a Diadem.”
An old writer advises that all the hives should have holes bored right through them to prevent spider-webs. He was also of opinion that the bees swarmed because of the queen’s tyranny, and if she followed them, they put her to death. He informs us that the drones were honey-bees which had lost their stings and grown fat. This was a very old idea, with which the sceptical Butler dealt in the following fashion: “The general opinion anent the Drone is that he is made of a honey-bee, that hath lost hir sting; which is even as likelie as that a dwarfe, having his guts pulled out, should become a gyant.” But the bee-masters of the Middle Ages were ever intolerant of other people’s mistaken ideas, while supporting with the gravest argument and show of learning equally benighted superstitions of their own.
A little book published in 1656, and called “The Country Housewife’s Garden,” is interesting, as it was probably written for cottagers by one almost in the same humble walk of life, whereas the bee-books generally of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were, for the most part, the work of men of considerably higher station.
This book, almost alone of its kind, harbours no fine theories on bee-keeping, but keeps throughout to rule-of-thumb methods. The writer, evidently caring little for speculation as to the origin of bees, but confining his remarks to practical honey-getting, takes up the following wholesome position: “Much discanting there is of, and about the Master Bees, and of their degrees, order, and Government: but the truth in this point is rather imagined, than demonstrated. There are some conjectures of it, viz., wee see in the combs diverse greater houses than the rest, and we commonly hear the night before they cast, sometimes one Bee, sometimes two or more Bees, give a lowde and severall sound from the rest, and sometimes Bees of greater bodies than the common sort: but what of all this? I leane not on conjectures, but love to set down that I know to be true, and leave these things to them that love to divine.” The “greater houses” here mentioned were, no doubt, the large cells in which the queens are bred. Just before swarming-time, as many as nine or ten of these are sometimes to be found in one hive.
The same writer has the inevitable ill word against the drones. These, he says, “are, by all probability and judgement, an idle kind of bees, and wastefull, which have lost their stings, and so being as it were gelded, become idle and great. They hate the bees, and cause them cast the sooner.”
Never did creature come by so bad a name, and so undeservedly, as the luckless drone with these old scribes. Another of them speaks of the drone as “a grosse Hive-Bee without sting, which hath beene alwaies reputed a greedy lozell (and therefore hee that is quicke at meat and slow at worke is fitted with this title): for howsoever he brave it with his round velvet cap, his side gowne, his full paunch, and his lowd voice; yet he is but an idle companion, living by the sweat of others’ brows. For he worketh not at all, either at home or abroad, and yet spendeth as much as two labourers: you shall never finde his maw without a good drop of the purest nectar. In the heat of the day he flieth abroad, aloft, and about, and that with no small noise, as though he would doe some great act: but it is onely for his pleasure, and to get him a stomach, and then returns he presently to his cheere.”
But it is among the writings of the old beemen with a taste for the quack-doctor’s art that some of the quaintest notions are to be found. We are told that honey, well rubbed into the scalp night and morning, is a sovereign remedy for baldness, and if it was mixed with a few dead bees and a little old comb well pounded, it was still more efficacious. Dead bees, dried and reduced to a powder, form a principal ingredient in all sorts of nostrums of the time. This powder, mixed with water and drunk every morning, is recommended as an unfailing cleanser to the system. And if the heads of a large number of bees are collected, burned, and the ashes compounded with a little honey, it makes an excellent salve for all sorts of eye disorders.
There was a famous preparation called Oxymel, which was in great vogue in mediæval times. It seems to have been nothing more than a mixture of honey, water, and vinegar; but it was accredited with extraordinary virtues. It was an infallible cure for sciatica, gout, and kindred ailments; and one writer also tells us that it was “good to gargarize with in a Squinancy.”
But honey and dead bees were not the only products of the hives which were pressed into medical service. Wax also was believed to have exceptional curative powers in all sorts of human ills. It had the faculty of curing ulcers, and “if the quantity of a Pease in Wax be swallowed down of Nurces, it doth dissolve the Milke curdled in the paps.” It was also used as an embrocation for stiff joints and aching muscles. The supposed curative value of beeswax in its natural state, however, was as nothing compared to its capabilities when distilled. This preparation, known as Oil of Wax, and famous at the time all the world over, seems to have come nearer the ideal of a panacea—a cure-all—than anything else before or since. The making of Oil of Wax seems to have been a very complicated affair. First the wax had to be melted, poured into sweet wine, and wrung out in the hands. This was done seven times, using fresh wine at each operation. Then the wax was placed in a retort with a quantity of red-brick powder, and carefully distilled. A yellow oil came over into the receiver, and this was distilled a second time, when the “Coelestiall or Divine medicine” was ready. Miraculous portents seem to have accompanied its preparation, for we are told that “in the coming forth of this Oile there appeareth in the Receiver the foure Elements, the Fire, the Aire, the Water, and the Earth, right marvellous to see.”
The power to stop immediately the falling out of the hair, heal the most serious wounds in a few days, and cure toothache and pains in the back, can be reckoned only among its minor virtues. Much greater properties were claimed for Oil of Wax, for it not only “killeth worms and cureth palsy and distempered spleens, but it bringeth forth the dead or living child.”
One last extract must be given from the same old writer. It relates to the generation of bees, and brings us out, perhaps, on the highest pinnacle of the marvellous. After a learned dissertation on the method of breeding bees from a dead ox—assuring us, however, that if we can procure a dead lion for the purpose, it will be much better, as then the bees will have a lion-like courage—the writer goes on to explain how bees may be produced in another way. We are to save all dead bees, burn them, sprinkle the ashes with wine, and then leave them exposed to the sun in a warm place. In a little while, we are told, all the bees so treated will come to life again, and we shall then have a new stock ready for hiving.
Dipping into these time-worn records of the Middle Ages, with their embrowned, scarce legible type and their antiquated phraseology, one comes at last to realise how very little the old bee-masters actually understood of the true ways of the honey-bee, or, indeed, of any real essential in bee-craft. And yet the production of honey and wax must have been an industry very largely developed in those days. Somehow or other, in spite of archaic theories and useless interference in the work of their hives, these people must have contrived to supply a market of whose magnitude we can nowadays form little conception. The trade in wax alone must have been a very large one, for, except in the poorest tenements, this formed the only available source of artificial light. And honey was in much more universal demand than it is now, because cane-sugar could hardly have developed into a serious rival as a sweetening agent among the masses at a time when it stood, perhaps, at two shillings a pound.
But in speculations of this kind, it must be borne in mind that, although the men who wrote about bees displayed so picturesque an ignorance in all matters appertaining to their charges, these formed a very small minority among the bee-keepers as a whole. Probably the bulk of the supply in honey and wax came from bee-gardens, whose owners neither knew nor cared anything about books, and were concerned only in the practical side of the work, where their knowledge, hereditary for the most part, amply sufficed for the part they played in it.
Moreover, it is only in latter-day, scientific apiculture that the work of the bee-master counts to any great extent. Nowadays, under the light of twentieth-century knowledge, this is competent to bring about the doubling, and even trebling, of the honey-harvest possible under the ancient methods. But the old skeppists did, and could do, little more than look on at the work of their bees, and here and there put a scarce availing hand to it. Nearly all the credit for the results achieved in those days must be given to the bees themselves, who, untold ages before, had brought to finite perfection their remarkable systems and policies. In all likelihood the bee-masters, the practical men who owned the hives, had much the same shrewd faculty of leaving things alone in far-off times as we observe among the skeppists of the last generation. In many ways, what they did at last come to do they did ill, notably in the apparently insane practice of destroying the bees to obtain the honey. But even this was not so foolish a procedure as it appears to-day. It was a plain matter of business, according to the lights of the time. Their process was to condemn to the sulphur-pit all the lightest and the heaviest of their stocks. Experience taught them that the weak colonies stood little chance of getting through the winter unless they were artificially fed; while if the bees of the large colonies were preserved, after being robbed of their stores, they would need the same provision. It was a matter of arithmetic. Artificial feeding was then a much more costly affair than it is to-day, and the reckoning came out well on the side of slaughter. The worst part of the business, so far as modern scientific bee-breeders are concerned, is that the old system of destruction tended to preserve only those strains of bees who were inveterate swarmers; while the steady, industrious stay-at-homes, who accumulated the largest stores of honey, were invariably exterminated. This is a fateful legacy to have passed on, when we consider that one of the chief aims of modern bee-science is to abolish swarming altogether. The swarming habit is one of the greatest obstacles in the way of a large honey yield, and until a race of non-swarming bees has been evolved by modern breeders there will always be this element of uncertainty in the honey harvest.
Latter-day beemen, therefore, join the chorus of disapproval of this old, senseless custom of bee-burning, rather because it has given them the task of undoing the work of ages before any progress is possible, than from the generally accepted humanitarian reasons.
In a village in Southern Sussex, close under the green brink of the Downs, there live two bee-keepers who represent, in their widely divergent methods and outlook, the extremes of beemanship as still extant in modern times.
The one dwells in a little ancient thatched cottage, set in the heart of an old-fashioned English garden, where dome-shaped hives of straw are dotted about at random amidst a wild growth of the old-fashioned English flowers. The other has built himself a trim villa on a hillside, topped with a sheltering crest of pine-wood; and here he has established a great modern honey-farm, replete with every device and system of management known to apiarian scientists throughout the two worlds.
Inverted straw bee-hive, showing natural arrangement of combs
One might suppose, on leaving the village street on a fine May morning and coming upon these two settlements in the open country beyond, that all the romance and old-world flavour of bee-keeping were inevitably to be found in the ancient bee-garden, where the droning music of the hives seems to originate in the thicket of blossoming lilac, and red-may, and veronica, the hives themselves being the last things one noticed in such a tangle of bright-hued flowers. To expect sentiment in the other quarter—a great cindered tract of country, with its long parallel rows of modern hives, all painted in various colours, its dwelling-house that might have been transplanted bodily from a well-to-do London suburb, and its line of outbuildings, with their bustle of business, and coughing oil-engine, and reverberation of hammer and saw—was to expect something evidently out-of-date and impossible. As well look for art in a Ghetto as to seek reverence for ancient bee-customs in a twentieth-century trading concern such as this, established to supply the market for honey just as a Manchester factory turns out calico and corduroy.
Many lovers of country life, peripatetic artists and chance pedestrians for the most part, came to the village with this notion firmly impressed upon them, and, visiting the old bee-garden and finding the old beautiful things there in abundance, went no farther, and became no wiser. They wandered round the crooked, red-tiled paths of the garden with its ancient proprietor; stooped under bowers of living gold and purple; waded through seas of scarlet poppy and blue forget-me-not and tawny mignonette; came upon old beehives in all sorts of shady, unpremeditated corners; and steeped themselves in mediævalism up to the eyes. The very song of the bees seemed to belong entirely to past days. None, surely, but a hopeless Vandal could put a colony of bees in one of the ugly square hives, and expect them to go honey-seeking in the old harmonious, happy way, sanctified of the ages. And so they never ventured up the hill to the great bee-farm, but kept to the garden below, and listened by the hour together to the quaint talk of its white-headed, smock-frocked owner, or stood valiantly at the foot of the ladder when he climbed up to dislodge a swarm from the moss-grown apple-boughs, or helped him to scour the new straw skeps with handfuls of mint and lavender, or beat out weird, unskilful music with the door-key on the old brass-pan when a swarm was high in the air.
Much could be learnt, it is true, from quiet days spent in the old bee-garden, especially in May, before the earliest swarms were ready to forsake the hives.
The first faculty to be acquired was that of wandering among the bees, or standing between their straw houses, undismayed at their incessant and often terrifying approaches. Whatever confidence one may place in bee-keepers’ assertions that their bees never sting, it is a bold man who can preserve entire equanimity when bees are settling continuously on his hands, his face, his clothing, and a whole flying squadron of them are shrilling vindictively about his ears. Nothing will come of it, he knows, if only he can keep still. But the tendency to turn and flee, or at least to beat off these minatory atoms with wildly waving arms, is all but irresistible for the novice. It is only their way, he is assured, of expressing or of satisfying their curiosity; and, this being done, they fly off harmlessly enough to give a good report of him to the ruling powers within the hive. But he knows that this report is sometimes anything but good. At least, there are a few luckless individuals in the world who dare not venture within a dozen yards of a beehive without being set upon unmercifully, and chased by an angry squad of these tart virgins for the space of a quarter-mile. Moreover, in certain states of the weather—when thunder is about, and the air is tense and still—bees will often sheath their barbed daggers in any human skin, even that of their owner, who has gone among them daily all the season unmolested. There is, therefore, a fateful element of chance in all near watching of beehives, a sensation of being under fire—fine discipline enough, but, for the timorous, hardly to be reckoned among the easy joys of existence.
These first deterrents, however, being happily overcome, the watcher is sure to be caught up, sooner or later, in the sheer fascination of the thing, and to find himself recklessly, almost breathlessly, looking on at what is nothing else than a great informing pageant of life.
He stands, as it were, a stranger at the gates of a city, inhabited by the most interesting, and in some respects the most advanced, people in the world. Of the inner life of the city, apart from the deep busy murmur that surges out to him, he learns nothing, and will learn nothing until he puts sentimental pride in his pocket, and makes pilgrimage to the great bee-farm on the hill. But here, in the meanwhile, is food enough to satisfy the keenest appetite for the marvellous. In and out through the yawning entrance-gate of the city, under the hot May sunshine, there are thousands of busy people coming and going. The broad threshold of the hive is completely hidden under opposing streams, the one setting out towards the fragrant fields and hedgerows, the other tumbling and seething in, almost every bee dragging after her some kind of mysterious treasure.
The outgoing bees start on their journey in two different fashions. Some emerge from the hive and rise at once on the wing, lancing straight off into the sunshine; and these are foragers, who have already made several journeys afield since the sun broke, hot and rosy, over the eastward hill. But others, essaying their first excursion for the day, creep out of the murmurous darkness of the hive, and come with a little impetuous rush to the edge of the alighting-board. Here they pause a moment to flutter their wings and rub their great eyes free of the hive-twilight. And then they lift into the air, hover an instant with their heads towards their dwelling, taking careful stock of it, sweep up into the blue, and volley away with the rest towards the distant hill-side, white with its bridal wreath of clover-bloom.
The homing bees move much more sedately. They come sailing in like bronze argosies laden to the water’s edge. Those bearing full sacs of clover-juice for the honey-making seldom carry an outside load of pollen as well. They have all to do in bringing their distended bodies to a safe anchorage on the entrance-board, and charge headlong into the hive, possessed of only one idea—to hand their garnered sweets over to the first house-bee they chance upon, and then to hurry out in search of another load. The pollen-bearers are impelled by the same white-hot energy; but their cargoes are infinitely more cumbersome, and demand a more leisurely pace. Some with panniers, heaped up with a deep orange-coloured material, must rest awhile on the threshold before gathering energy enough to drag their glowing burdens through the city gate. Others just fail to make the harbour, and sink down on to the grass below, to wait for the same freshet of strength that is finally to bring them into the security of the populous haven. Scores of them do not try for harbour at first tack, but, coming safely into the calm waters of the garden, rest awhile on the nearest leaf or blossom, panting and tremulous, until they are able to wear sail for the last reach home.
There is infinite diversity in the loads of these pollen-carrying bees. Hardly a colour, or shade of colour, in the rainbow fails to pass during every moment across the thronging way. Every bee carries a half-globe of this substance, beautifully rounded and shaped, on each of her two hind-legs. It is possible, by marking the colour of her burden, to tell with certainty what flower she has been plundering on each of her trips. This bright orange, which makes always the largest and heaviest bales in the stream of merchandise, is from the dandelions. From the gorse-flowers come loads of deep rich brown almost as weighty. The charlock, that mingles its useless, wanton beauty with every farm-crop, yields the bee interminable gold. White clover, red clover, sainfoin, all load up the little hive coolies with different shades of russet. From the apple-orchards come bursting panniers of pale yellow; the blackberry-blossom yields pollen of a delicate greenish-white. When summer comes, and the poppies make scarlet undertones amidst the wheat and barley, these winged merchant-women stream homeward with their pollen-baskets laden with funereal black.
But, if you watch a hive at work on any bright spring or summer morning, you will see single bees occasionally pass with loads whose source has never yet been fathomed. The lean, glistening, rufous stuff that is continually borne through the hustling crowd is resin gathered from poplar or pine, and used to glue the straw hive down to its base-board, or to stop up draughty crevices and useless corners, or, diluted into varnish, to paint the honeycombs with an acid-proof, preservative film. But now and then comes a bee with a load whose colour shines up like a danger-signal in darkness. Brilliant scarlet, or soft rose-crimson, or pale lavender, or gleaming white—who shall say in what far, forgotten nook of the country-side she has been adventuring, or what rare blossom she has chanced upon in the wilderness, and, despoiling it of its maiden treasure greedily, has quickened into duplication the beauty that was its reason for life?
Yet the greatest wonder about all this pollen-gathering is that each separate load has been taken entirely from one species of flower. The little half-spheres are packed into the pollen-cells indiscriminately, orange on brown, pale yellow mingled with green, or buff, or grey. But each pair of panniers, representing a single journey, contains the pollen-dust of one kind of blossom alone. Going out into an English lane or meadow to watch the bees at work, the first conviction borne in upon an observer is that the bees are darting about from flower to flower without other thought than to load up from any and every capable blossom that stands in their way. But closer scrutiny reveals a curious plan and order in this, as in everything else that the honey-bee undertakes. Tracing an individual bee in her progress along the flowery verge of the lane, you will soon see that she visits only one species of blossom. If she starts on hawthorn, it will be hawthorn all the way. If her load of willowherb-nectar or pollen is not yet a full one, she will overpass a score of tansy-knots or waving jungles of meadow-sweet, just as inviting and resourceful, apparently, to reach the one scanty patch of purple at the end of the lane.
Why she should be at such pains to keep the pollen separate as she gathers it, only to get it inextricably mingled with every other kind in the storehouse at home, is a problem that none but a bee can solve. But all the honey-bee’s reasons and motives in life are made up of a curious blend of cold-drawn sense and sentiment; and it may be inferred that need and fancy have an equal influence in guiding her in this, as in everything else she does, from her cradle-cell to her grave. Not altogether without seriousness, it may be hazarded that quite as probable a reason for her way of pollen-gathering is that she deems a certain shade of colour makes a more becoming flying-robe, as that she keeps each load of pollen pure, unblended, because of some imperious, economic need of the hive. The factor of sex, in all observation of the ways of the honey-bee, is no more to be considered a negligible one than it is in the critical contemplation of the human species of hive.
All this incessant coming and going of the busy foragers is alluring enough to the looker-on, but there is evidence of many other activities equally interesting. The work of collecting nectar and pollen is obviously only a part of the duties of this self-immolated spinster-race. Here and there in the seething, hurrying crowd there are bees who do not move with the rest, but, anchored securely in the full force of the living current, with heads lowered and turned towards the hive, are engaged in fanning their wings, and this so swiftly that nothing of the wing but a little grey mist can be seen. Looking more carefully, you will make out that these bees are arranged in nearly regular rows, one behind the other, in open order, so that the conflicting tides of foragers can pass uninterruptedly between. If the watcher is bold enough to bring his ear down to the level of the hive, he will make out a steady hissing noise that rings clear above all the din and turmoil made by the incessant travellers to and fro. These rows of fanners are seen to stretch from the hive-door right to the edge of the footplate, but principally on one side; and still closer observation will reveal the fact that there is a regular system of relief among them. Though the general volume of sound never abates one jot, every few minutes one or another of these stationary bees moves away, her place being immediately taken by another, who settles down to the common task in line with the rest. The reason for all this is plain enough: the fanners are engaged in ventilating the hive, drawing a current of vitiated air through the entrance on one side, which flanks, but does not oppose, a corresponding current of pure air sucked in on the other.
All through the warm days of spring and summer this fanning squadron is constantly at work; nor does it cease with the darkness. Chill nights find the ranks weakened and reduced to perhaps only a few bees, or even to none at all when a cold snap of weather intervenes. But in the dog-days, or, as the ancients used to say, when Sirius, the honey-star, is shining, the deep sibilant note of these fanners rises, in a populous apiary, almost to the voice-strength of a gale of wind. To come out then under the stars of a summer night, and stand listening in the tense, fragrant darkness to this mighty note, is to get an impression of bee-life unattainable at any other season. In the daytime the sound is intermingled, overwhelmed, by the chorus of the flying bees. But now all are safely at home. Each hive is packed from floor to roof with tens of thousands of breathing, heat-producing creatures: the necessity for ventilation is quadrupled, and, far and wide in the bee-garden, the fanning armies are setting to their work with a will.
The freshman at this fascinating branch of nature-study, brought out into the quiet night to hear such gargantuan music, is always strangely affected by it, some natures incredibly so. In all the great placid void of darkened hill and dale around him, in the whole blue arch overhead, alive with the flinching silver of the stars, there is no sound but a chance trill of a nightingale, the bark of a shepherd’s dog on the distant upland, or, now and then, the droning song of a beetle passing invisibly by. All the world seems at rest, save these mysterious people in the hives; and with them the sound of labour is only redoubled. Bending down to the nearest hive in the darkness, the note comes up to one like the angry roar of the sea. A light brought cautiously to bear upon it, discloses the alighting-board covered with rows of bees, working, as it were, for their lives; while other bees continually wander in and out of the entrance—the sentries that guard it night and day, just as soldiers guarded the gates of human cities in olden times. The novice at bee-craft, even the most staid and matter-of-fact, is invariably plunged into marvelling silence at the sight. But if the night be exceptionally hot and oppressive, and the fanning army unusually large, the bee-master with an eye for dramatic effect generally finishes the tiro’s wonderment by showing him an old trick. He lowers the candle until the flame is just behind the squadron of ventilating bees, and at once all is darkness: the current of air drawn out of the hive has proved strong enough to extinguish the light.
It has been said that there are guard-bees who watch the hive-door day and night. To the unskilled human eye one bee looks very like another, and it is difficult to understand how, in the many thousands that pass, the guards manage to detect an intruder so unerringly, and to eject her with such unceremonious promptitude as is always shown. Probably it is not by sight alone that these occasional interlopers are singled out. The sense of smell in the honey-bee is extraordinarily acute, and this, no doubt, assists the guards in their difficult work. It is well known that a queen-bee must possess a very distinct odour, as her mere presence abroad, even when shut up in a box, will attract the drones from all quarters. In all likelihood the peculiar aroma from each queen-bee impregnates the whole colony, and thus the guard-bees are able at once to distinguish their own kin from that of alien stocks.
Still watching the outside life of the hive in the old bee-garden, many other interesting things come to light. In such an establishment, even if it be only an old-fashioned straw skep, perhaps more than twenty thousand individuals are located; and obviously some regular system of cleaning and scavenging is indispensable. This work can be seen now, going on uninterruptedly in the midst of all the other busy enterprises. Every moment bees come labouring out, bearing particles of refuse, which they throw over the edge of the foot-board, and at once shoulder their way back for another load. Other bees appear, carrying the bodies of comrades who have died in the hive; and every now and then one comes struggling through the crowd, bearing high above her a strange and ghastly thing, perfect replica of herself, but white throughout, save for its black beady eyes. This is the unborn bee, dead in its cradle-cell. Infant mortality is an evil not yet overcome even by the doughty honey-bee, and many are carried out thus, especially in early spring. Watching these undertakers of the hive in their gruesome but necessary work, a singular fact can be noted. While all other debris is merely cast over the brink of the entrance-board, where it accumulates day by day on the grass below, these dead larvæ are never disposed of thus. They are carried right away, their bearers taking wing and flying straight off over the hedgerow, to drop them at harmless distance from the neighbourhood of the hive.
There is still another kind of work going briskly forward round the gates of the bee-city. Certain among these stay-at-home bees seem to exercise a sort of common overseership. They help those weighed down with too heavy a cargo to reach the city gates. If a lump of pollen is dropped in the general scuffle, these bees seize it and take it into the hive. Sometimes a bee comes eddying downward, smothered from head to foot with pollen, like a golden miller, and she is immediately pounced upon by these superintendents, and combed free of her incommodious treasure. Others see to the grooming of the young bees, about to essay their first flight. The youngster sits up, protruding her tongue to its fullest extent, while half a dozen bees gather round her, licking and stroking her on every side. At last her toilette is done, and she is liberated, when, with a little flutter of her wings, she lifts high into the blue air and sunshine and makes off with the rest to the clover-fields, glittering afar off in the joyous midday light.
For insensibly the hours have worn on—it is noon—and the tense thronging life, the deep rich labour-song, of the bee-garden seem to have reached their height. But suddenly a greater noise than ever arises on all sides: a steady stream of bees, larger and bulkier than the rest, is pouring out of every hive. The drones, the lazy brothers of these laborious vestals, have roused at last from their sleep, and are coming abroad for their daily flight. In twos and threes, in whole battalions, they hustle out, and begin their noontide gambols about the hive, filling the air with a gay, roistering song. In a little while they will be all gone to their revels, and the bee-garden will seem, by comparison, strangely quiet. But now the sudden accession of energy is unmistakable. With the awakening of the drones there seems to be a new spirit abroad. The air is no longer filled to overflowing with busy foragers. Many of these have joined the dance round the hives, so that each bee-dwelling is the centre of a singing, gambolling crowd, moved rather by a spirit of play, almost of idleness. But this brief moment of relaxation soon passes. The drones betake themselves to their marital pleasuring in the fields. The noisy midday symphony dies down to the old steady monotone of work. And the watcher at the gates of the bee-city turns to retrace his steps down the flower-garlanded way of the old pleasance, satiated with wonders, yet not satisfied, his curiosity only quickened a thousandfold for that which has been inexorably held from him, a glimpse of what is happening behind those baffling walls of straw.
Wending slowly homeward, and pondering, he asks himself many questions. What is the reason, the final outcome, of all this earnest, well-directed labour? What is done with the pollen that has been carried in all the morning long? Where there is obviously so much system, and unanimity, and ingenious division of endeavour, there cannot fail to be a supreme and governing intelligence to allot the part that each must play. This story of a queen—of a single bee, larger than all the rest, to whom all pay allegiance, and who spends her whole life in the dim labyrinth of the hive, like the Pope in the Vatican—is it a truth, or only a figment of the ignorant, bucolic brain? If this queen exist, if every hive have indeed its absolute monarch, who directs the whole complex life and policy of the bee-city, where in the scale of reasoning creatures must she be placed?
And then, if he be wise, the student will learn at last to give the picturesque old bee-garden its true appraisement. Ancient things conserve their beauty, and win the love of the right kind of lovers, more and more with every century that glides by. Only their usefulness, their import in the tide of human knowledge and progress, has gone with the years. It is so with the bee-garden under its Maytide robe of green leaves and rainbow blossoms. It is beautiful in its glad appearances, its echo of old voices, its odour of the sanctity in ancient ways and days. But it can tell us nothing of all we want to know. It can only ask us riddles to which we have no answers. For these we must set aside old fanciful scruples; turn our backs, once for all, on its enchantment and its sweetness; bend our steps unswervingly towards the great modern bee-farm on the hill.
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.
Comb-frame from modern hive, with Queen
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.