All know the English honey-bee—the Black Bee, as she is called, partly to distinguish her from her foreign rivals, and partly, it would seem, because she is not black at all, but a rich brown—but all do not know her origin. Probably she came to us from the tropics by easy stages, swarm out-flying swarm, until the most adventurous crossed the English Channel in remote ages, when it was only a narrow race of water, or even before Great Britain was detached from the mainland.
It was the black bee, and not the motley-coloured Italian or other varieties, who came to us thus, for the same reason, probably, that the Celts came—because they were a hardy race, loving, and being more fitted for the bracing northern atmosphere than the heat and languor of the south. Modern bee-breeders who are trying so hard to acclimatise in Britain the golden-girdled or silver-fringed bee-races of other lands, might well ponder this fact. No keener controversy rages to-day among English bee-masters than this one of the relative merits of native and foreign stocks. But assuredly Nature has not erred in this respect. South Down sheep can be reared in any county, but nowhere so fine as on the Sussex Downs. The like principle holds good with the English bee. The ages have evolved her from her tropic beginnings to make her what she is—a doughty, essentially British creature, thriving against all odds of fickle climate, when her more tender sisters from the south are hard put to it for a living. She has held her own against them, and more than her own. In bumper seasons, such as we get all too rarely, when, in sober truth, the land is flowing with honey, there is little to choose between the rival honey-makers. But through good and bad, early and late, for steady, dogged industry, invincible hardihood, tangible results, the English black bee has out-distanced all competitors. Thousands of years have gone to her making, and thousands more may conceivably fit the yellow-skirted Ligurian for British work. But labour for so remote a posterity were altruism meeter for angels than for men.
In her old primæval fastnesses the honey-bee is little likely to have troubled herself with hive-making, but to have hung her combs to some convenient branch in the forest, much as the bees in India do to-day. The habit of seeking some hollow tree or cleft in the rock grew upon her probably as she advanced northward, and some nightly or seasonal shelter became more and more an imperious need. The present-day customs of wild creatures give some inkling of their ancestral ways, but it is in their occasional aberrations from these customs that we get the truest indications of what their original state must have been. Lost swarms of bees, if they fail to pitch upon some better site, will often build in the open, either suspending their waxen houses from some horizontal branch, or making them in the heart of a thick bush.
The ways of the honey-bee are full of such deviations, due, perhaps, to the working of old ancestral memory rousing dimly in the midst of modern needs. The issue of a swarm may be nothing else than the survival of an old process, vital enough in its day, but, under the present civilised conditions of bee-life, lacking the whet of entire necessity. For, in all respects, the life of the bee, ancient as it is, is an evolved civilisation, and not a surviving, aboriginal state. It is conceivable that the foxes have their holes, and the birds their nests, much after the same fashion as in the days when Adam invented love-making. But the twentieth-century honey-bee is not of this kind. The communal habit itself may even have been a comparatively late introduction in her progress. It is possible to get some idea of the path she won for herself through the ages by studying the ways of creatures now living, but immeasurably less advanced than the bee. There are distant connections of hers—lonely little wood-wasps and others—which never associate with their kind, but get through the short summer hours in solitude, and die with the waning season, leaving the perpetuation of their species to the children they never see. The common wasp is nearer the honey-bee in development, but still infinitely far behind. The fecundated queen-wasp comes out of her winter hiding-place, fashions a cell or two in some hole in the ground, and deposits her first eggs, thus laying the foundation of a colony which, populous enough in the season, must nevertheless perish with the next winter chills.
In the primæval tropics the honey-bees may have lived in separate families, each with its teeming mother, its indolent, lie-abed father—the Turveydrop of creation—and its bevy of youngsters, every one going out, when grown, to establish a home for itself. The modern bee-city, with its complicated systems and laws, and its innumerable multitudes, may have originated only when change of habitat and climate brought about the necessity for a new order of things. Living in perpetual warmth, in a land where blossom followed blossom in unending succession, there would be no need for such co-operation. The one little family, snugging close in its moss-roofed corner, could sustain its own temperature; and where there was unceasing array of nectar-producing flowers, foresight would have been folly: the winter larder would have been left to take care of itself.
But as the young bees, leaving their homes, and flying ever northward, came first into temperate zones, and then into the fringe of Arctic influences, the conditions gradually changed. The perpetual sipping-garden was left behind; and a season came in each year—short at first, but inevitably lengthening—when there were no flowers. Hard necessity must have taught the bee, then, first to gather together with her kind for warmth during the cold season; and then, as this got longer and longer, to make some food-provision for winter days that would eke out endurance until the spring sun again wooed the earth into flower-giving. Thus the first communal bee-nests must have been evolved from the universal need of the race: the first common storehouses instituted: a host of unforeseen difficulties and side-issues encountered, and means for dealing with them contrived. The spirit of invention must have been busy then with the race, and taxed to the limit, of her resources. For never did Pandora open celestial casket upon earth with more redoubtable consequences, than when the Great Artificer set up the honey-bee as an examplar of city-building to the nomadic world of men.
From the crowding together of the separate bee-families for mutual protection against the elements, to a complete and permanent fusion of life and interests, must have been only a step, as Nature works. But then there must have been stirring times—social upheavals, educative disasters, a cataclysmic war of sex. Bee-life must have been shaken to its very foundations. When and how the woman-bee first got the upper hand in the direction of affairs, it is unimportant to determine. But it is certain that she got it, and has kept it ever since. The population problem must have been the great, overwhelming one. With hundreds of prolific mothers in the hive, each having enough to do at home in rearing her own children, and a crowd of lazy, irresponsible drones who could do nothing but dance in the sunshine or go a-wooing, how were the daily needs of the hive to be satisfied, leaving out of account the provision that must be made for coming winter days? It was clearly a case of reform or annihilation; and it may be conceived that the woman-bees, in default of masculine initiative, took the reins into their own hands.
It is a prophetic story. First they discovered their latent powers. The harmless ovipositor revealed itself as a prime weapon of offence. Thus the army was with the revolutionaries, and the rest was easy. A great, far-reaching scheme was set afoot. Motherhood was to be a privilege of the few and the fittest; work the compulsory lot of the mass. Hard times had already bred a lean, unfertile gang among them, and it was discovered that famine rations in the nursery meant a wholesale increase in these natural spinsters of the race. Henceforth the little sex-atrophied worker-bee was multiplied in the hive, while the fully nurtured mothers were gradually reduced to a few—at last to one alone. It was a triumph of collective self-sacrifice for the well-being and high persistence of the race.
All this may be imagined as having taken place in infinitely remote times, long before man succeeded in distinguishing himself from the apes. In the honey-bee of to-day, and her life in the modern hive, we get a sort of quintessence of the ages; a creature developed in mind and body by her unique conditions, these conditions again imposing upon her unique systems of life. Like Ruskin’s Venetian, she must live nobly or perish. Much more is required of her than the role of domestic and political economist. To make the modern beehive a possibility there must be architects, mathematicians, and chemists within its walls. Sanitary science must have its skilled exponents, or the hive would change into a death-trap within a few hours. There must be land-surveyors ready to explore the country, just before the issue of the swarms, to determine for them their new location. There must be overseers, gang-forewomen, everywhere to superintend every work in progress throughout the hive. Above all, there must be a supreme central power, a farseeing intelligence, to divine the imminent common need, and to set the forces of the State to work, in right time and order, to provide for it. If all these cannot be proved to exist in a hive of bees to-day, at least the necessity for them is undeniable; and as undeniable, the achieved results.
The “turn of the days,” when the winter sun has passed its nadir of feebleness and just made its earliest wan recovery in the skies, marks the true beginning of the honey-bee’s year. Then the first few eggs are laid in the heart of the brood-nest; the drowsy cluster begins to show an interest in life; the water-carriers bestir themselves, watching for a bright warm morning that they may sally forth to ply their trade.
Dangerous work it is at this season, yet most necessary. Without water the rearing of the young bees is impossible on any but the smallest scale. Water is needed at every stage of their development, and, lacking it, the progress of the colony must be fatally checked. Even the mature bees will starve and die in the midst of plenty, if their honey-stores are candied, and no water is available to dissolve the inassimilable sweets. The hive that shows honey crystals thrown down on the floor, and littering the entrance, is sure to be in desperate case. The bees are tearing open every store-cell, casting away the solidified honey as refuse, to get at the moister portion below. If the cold spell does not break, or the bee-master is unready with his artificial supplies, the colony must perish. So the water-bearers watch for the sunshine, and its first warm glance brings them out to rifle the nearest dewdrops, or track down by its bubbling music the hidden woodland stream. Many die at this work in the early months of the year, chilled by their load on the homeward journey, or snapped up by hungry birds. But at every cost the future life of the colony must be assured, though, of all the hive-people, none but the queen-mother will be alive to see it in its summer fulness.
We are accustomed to think of a hive of bees as a permanent institution, Death playing his old, unceasing, busy part, but young Life more than outplaying him, just as the way is in a city-hive of men. The analogy holds good, but in bee-life the changes are infinitely more rapid. The life of the worker-bee extends, at most, to six months or so; and in the busy season she may die, worn out by labour, in as many weeks. The reapers of last year’s honey-harvest were dead by the autumn. The late-born bees, that went into winter quarters with polished thorax and ragged wings, survived only long enough to nurture their immediate successors; and these, again, will live but to bring to maturity the young spring-broods. Not a bee among them will ever again go honey-gathering. Except for the long-lived queen-mother, and the old hive and its furniture, each colony with every year becomes a totally new thing.
Hibernation, in the true sense of the word, has no part in bee-life. The queen-wasp and countless other creatures hibernate, passing the cold months in a torpor of sleep until the enduring warmth of another year lures them back to active existence. But the honey-bees have a better way: they gather together in a dense, all but motionless cluster in the heart of the hive, with their precious queen in their midst and their food-stores above them. At this time honey is their only necessary food, and very little of this suffices to keep up the needful temperature of the colony. When they are out and about at their work, or busy within the hive, the nitrogenous pollen must be added to their daily ration of nectar to build up wasted tissues; but now honey, the nectar concentrated, the heat-producer, is all they want. The bees of the cluster nearest to the combs broach the full cells beneath them, and the honey is passed through the crowd, each bee getting its scanty dole.
Economy is now reduced to a fine art. None knows when a fresh supply may be available, although no chance will be lost to replenish the larder at the first sign of returning warmth. But now the barest minimum of food is taken, and as the nearest cells become emptied of their contents, the cluster moves a step upward. Thus there is a system of slow browsing over the combs, until the dense flock of bees has reached the highest limit of the hive, when new grazing-ground must be taken. But the movement of the cluster is exceedingly slow, perhaps the slowest thing in the animate world. All recognise that existence depends on the stores being eked out to their uttermost. It is a scientific damping-down of the fires of life—a carefully thought-out and perfected plan for preserving the greatest possible number of worker-bees alive on the smallest practicable amount of food, so that the largest possible army of nurse-bees and foragers may be at hand in the springtime to raise the young bees that are to represent the future colony.
But there is no hibernation. It is doubtful even if bees ever sleep, either in their season of greatest activity or in the coldest depths of winter. At all times a slight rap on the hive will awaken an immediate timorous outcry within. Sturdy knocking will soon bring the guard-bees to the entrance to find out the cause of the disturbance, and many bees lose their lives from this vigilant habit alone. On frosty days the tits may often be seen perched on the entrance-board of a hive, beating out a noisy tattoo, and snapping up every bee that emerges; and many other small birds have discovered the same never-failing source of a meal.
The fact that, with a healthy stock of bees, the interior of a hive always preserves its clean condition, is usually a great puzzle to the novice. In the summer, when the bees are passing continually in and out, this is not so vast a matter for wonder. But in winter-time, when the colony is confined to the hive often for weeks together, it is remarkable that neither the combs nor floor of the hive are ever soiled by excreta. This is a difficulty that the sanitary department in the hive has successfully coped with long ago. It must have been one of the earliest problems that presented itself when the honey-bee first evolved the communal habit. The Ancients believed that all the excreta of the hive were deposited by the bees in certain privy-cells, and thence removed at intervals by the scavenging authorities. There is nothing in this notion, absurd as it is, outside the scope of bee-ingenuity; on the contrary, such a crude device would be little likely to commend itself to the hive-people, as it would be ridiculously inadequate to the case. How great must be the problem of the preservation of cleanliness in a hive, can only be understood when the whole conditions are considered together, and that from a human standpoint. Putting the figures unwarrantably low, what measure of success could the greatest genius that ever lived among sanitary scientists ever hope to achieve, if he were given the task of keeping in cleanly condition, perfect ventilation, and even temperature, a building where 10,000 individuals were crowded together storey above storey—a building hermetically sealed throughout except for one small opening at the lowest level, which must serve for all purposes of entrance and exit to its denizens, as well as sole conduit for the removal of the foul air and introduction of the pure? The task would be gigantic enough in the summer-time, when a large proportion of the inhabitants were away at work during a greater part of the day; but in winter, when all were continuously at home for weeks together, what conceivable device, or combination of devices, could prevent the building soon developing into first a quagmire and then a charnel-house, to which the Black Hole of Calcutta would be a model sanitary retreat?
Yet the difference between such a building and a beehive is only one of degree. The same conditions are involved, and the same evils must be combated. Relatively, the problem is the same in each. In the case of the beehive, the necessity for this close system of life has been very gradually imposed on its inhabitants; and age-long custom, working on the individual, has at length produced a race marvellously adapted to its special needs. Probably the habit of retention of fæces while in the hive was at first a voluntary one. This, carried on from generation to generation, would react on the physical organism until use became second nature, and finally the present condition was reached. It is a fact that the bee is now incapable of voiding its excreta within the hive, or when at rest. The muscles involved can come into action only during, or immediately after, vigorous flight. In the winter, when long spells of cold occur, not a bee leaves the hive perhaps for weeks together; but an hour’s warm sunshine will infallibly bring the whole company out in a little eddying crowd about the hive, and then the necessary action of nature can readily be seen. These cleansing flights occur on all practicable occasions, and fulfil a double purpose; for when the cluster forms again, it will be between combs where the stores are unexploited, and the old, steady, upward feeding-march begins again in a new place. In extraordinary seasons, when the cold weather is much prolonged, the population of a hive may die of starvation within reach of plenty, no opportunity for these flights having presented itself, and the cluster therefore not having left its original station. And here the bee is plainly the victim of her own advanced acumen. Instinct would never have led her into such a foolish plight; but reason, being liable to err, errs here egregiously.
The comparison of a modern beehive with a building similar in construction, and as densely crowded with human beings, brings the whole problem to a sharp definition. In such a building, unless a through-current of air could be established, the preservation of life must soon become impossible. Yet the bees have triumphantly overcome all difficulties. Whether in winter or summer, the air within the hive is almost as pure as that in the open, while the temperature can be regulated at will. For the ordinary purposes of the hive—honey-brewing, and the hatching of the young brood—it is kept uniformly at 80° to 85°. When the wax-makers are at work, it rises suddenly to 95° or so, while at the time of the swarming-fever it is often allowed to go even higher. In the hottest days of summer, however, unless the emigration-furore possesses the colony, the interior of a well-made hive seldom shows a temperature of more than 80°. And all this is brought about in a very simple fashion.
The sanitary expert, of merely human stock, could attack the problem in only one way. He must have a through-current of air, impelled either mechanically or automatically; and he must have heating-apparatus acting within the building itself, or warming the incoming draught of air. But the bees work on totally different principles. They will have nothing to do with the through-current system of ventilation. If the ingenious bee-master pierce air-holes in the walls of a hive, the bees will spend the night in carefully stopping them up again. In the old bee-garden we saw the fanning-army drawing out the impure air. These bees had their heads pointing towards the entrance; but, inside the hive, there was another army of fanners, facing the opposite way, and thus helping to drive the same sidelong current. Throughout nearly the whole interior of the hive on hot days fanning-bees can be seen, all helping to keep up this movement. The result is that the pure air, being sucked in at one side of the entrance, flows round the hive and travels out at the other side, much as a rope goes over a pulley-block. The swiftest current of air keeps to the walls and roof of the hive, the air in the centre being changed more slowly. Thus the honeycombs, which are always in the upper stories, lie in the full stream, and the moisture, which the maturing honey is continually giving off, is carried rapidly away; while the brood-combs, lying in the lower, central part, are ventilated more slowly, the air being thoroughly warmed before it reaches them. The larger the fanning-army is, the more swiftly flows the air, and the faster the heat of the hive is carried off. In this way the bees can regulate the hive-temperature to the requirements of the moment, putting more numerous gangs to work in the hottest season, or stopping the fanners altogether in mid-winter, when the natural, buoyant heat-exhalation from the cluster is sufficient to keep up the gentle circulation which then is alone needed.
Sometimes, when the colony is unusually large, the fanning-party will be divided into two detachments, one at each side of the entrance, leaving the centre for the inflow of air. In this case a double-loop system of ventilation appears to be formed.
It has been said that the ways of the honey-bee are nearly all subject to variation—that in bee-life there are few hard-and-fast, undeviating laws. The rule, of one queen-mother only to each hive, appears to be more absolute than any other, yet it is not without its exceptions. Well authenticated instances are on record where two queens have existed amicably in the same hive, each laying her daily quota of eggs unmolested by the other, and, apparently, with the full approval of the hive-authorities.
It is now also certain that a skilful bee-master can accustom his bees to the presence of more than one queen. Recent experiments in America on this head, although convincing enough as far as they go, need the test of time before their practical value to apiculture can be rightly estimated. To multiply its domestic deities may prove anything but a blessing to the harmony and welfare of a hive. But the fact has been well established that the old rule, of one queen at a time, may be upset—whether permanently, and for the ultimate advantage of honey-making, time alone can tell.
A single queen, when young and vigorous and of good blood, is able to keep an entire hive filled with brood throughout the short honey-gathering season. The brood-nest of a modern frame-bar hive has a comb-surface of over 2,000 square inches, giving about 50,000 cells available for the breeding of young worker-bees. This represents, at times of greatest prosperity, an enormous floating population; but if several queens can be permanently established in one hive, and the hives enlarged to permit each her fullest scope, the figures will soon begin to stretch out into infinity. Two facts are well known to experienced bee-keepers—that a large stock gathers more honey than two small stocks containing between them the same number of individuals; and that, when the honey-crop is in full yield, there are seldom enough bees to harvest it. The whole art of latter-day bee-keeping consists in bringing up the numerical strength of each colony to its fullest in time for the great main nectar-flow. Yet, in a good district and in a good season, when huge areas of clover or sainfoin come into full blossom at the same time, and the nectar must be gathered or lost within the space of a fortnight or so, the most populous apiary is seldom equal to the task. Probably, in exceptional seasons, half the English honey-crop is lost for want of bees to gather it. If, therefore, the new system of plurality of queens both justifies and establishes itself, the near future may see a revolution in all ideas relating to beemanship. All that can be said for certain at present is that as many as five queens have been induced to occupy the same hive in peace and quiet together; but whether this portentous state of affairs can remain a lasting one is still to be proved.
A curious and, to the expert, a startling outcome of these efforts to break down an old and almost universal custom in bee-life, is that the successful establishment of several mother-bees in a single hive appears to lessen the swarming impulse. Hives so treated do not send out a swarm so far as is known. One of the most disappointing experiences in bee-craft is to see prosperous stocks breaking themselves up into several hopelessly weak detachments just before the great honey-flow, when strength of numbers is the one vital thing; and if plurality of queens will prevent this vexatious evil, the old time-honoured custom is sure to go.
The student of bee-life, watching the year’s work in the hive from its earliest beginnings, and marking its steady, cautious development, will readily see how the ancient idea of the mother-bee’s absolute monarchy gained its vogue. The deception of appearances is all but complete. Right in the heart of the winter-cluster he sees the queen bestirring herself to lay the first eggs, and the bees around her slowly awakening to the duty before them. With the passing of the weeks, he sees the brood-area steadily enlarging; the hitherto close-packed throng of workers gradually extending itself over a larger space of comb; the water-fetchers increasingly busy; the pollen-gathering bees already at work in the crocus-borders of the garden, where the year’s first gold and white and purple is gaily flaunting in the sun. He notes that the progress of the colony within the warm hive does not go by the calendar, but checks with each return of cold, and forges ahead only when the spring seems to be coming in right good earnest. He sees, even now, when February is waning and the hazel-catkins fill the bare woodland with a shimmer of emerald, that the colony still husbands its stores, eking them out with a long-sighted parsimony that shall be more than justified when the inevitable cold break comes in the flowery midst of the English May. It is impossible to overlook the evidence of a wise, directing mind through it all; and where should this be seated but in the brain of the single large bee, courted and fed and groomed unceasingly by the attendant host around her—she who is the teeming mother of past tens of thousands, and who carries in her body the seed of all the generations to come?
Yet the truth is that the queen-bee is the very reverse of a monarch, both by nature and inclination. She possesses only the merest rudiment of intelligence. She has a magnificent body, great docility, certain almost unrestrainable impulse and passions, a yielding, womanish love of the yoke; but she is incapable of action other than that arising from her bodily promptings. Her brain is much smaller than that of the worker. In a dozen different ways she is inferior to the common worker-bees, who rule her absolutely, mapping out her entire daily life and using her for the good of the colony, just as a delicate, costly piece of mechanism is used by human craftsmen to produce some necessary article of trade.
In a word, the queen is the sole surviving representative of the aboriginal female honey-bee. The aborted females, the workers, are almost as much a product of civilisation as the human race itself.
Every step of the way now, in a study of the life of the bee, is hedged about with wonders. It is seen that the common worker-bee is raised in a cell allowing her only the barest minimum of space for development, while the queen has an apartment twice as long as she can possibly need. The worker-cells are so designed that as many a possible may be contained in a given area, and their construction involve the least possible amount of material. Therefore these cells are made in the form of a hexagon, this being the only shape approaching the cylindrical—the ideal form—of which a number will fit together over a plane surface without leaving useless spaces in between. Moreover, the cells needing to be closed at the bottom, half the material required for this purpose is saved by the device of placing the sheets of combined hexagons back to back, so that one base will serve for two cells. But it is not only in the construction of the cradles of the worker-bees that rigid economy is practised. From the moment that the egg hatches until the young grub changes into the chrysalis state, it is given only the smallest quantity of food that will support life and allow necessary development.
In the case of the young queen-larva, however, a very different policy is instituted from the beginning. Not only is she given nursery-quarters allowing every facility for growth, but she is loaded with a specially rich kind of food night and day, until she actually swims in it. The nurse-bees are constantly pouring this glistening white substance into the cell for the whole five days of her larval existence, and the effect of this generous diet is obvious from the first in her more rapid growth, as compared with the worker-bee. A further advantage still is that the young queen has perfectly free access to the air at all stages of her development. The worker-cell is but sparsely ventilated, and that only through the narrow top, all its six sides and base being absolutely impervious. But the cradle-cell of the queen is not only made of a porous material throughout, but it is commonly placed at the edge of the comb, where it stand out in the full current of ventilation, the air percolating the whole substance of its walls in addition to entering freely at the large cell-mouth. Thus the main cause of the extraordinary difference in the development of the queen-bee and the worker is that of treatment; the one being given unlimited rich food and oxygen and room to grow in, the other receiving only meagre workhouse diet, restricted quarters, and little air to breathe.
Yet, making every allowance for the stimulating or retarding effect of these agencies on the young female grub, we are still hardly any nearer to solution of the mystery. We are compelled to believe that the egg which produces the worker is identical in its nature with that from which is evolved the queen-bee, because a simple experiment will at once dispel all doubt on the matter. If the egg deposited in the queen-cell be removed and an egg taken from any one of the thousand of worker-cells in a hive be put in its place, the worker-egg will always produce a fully developed and accoutred queen-bee. On the other hand, if an egg be taken from a queen-cell and placed in a worker-cell, it will as infallibly hatch out into a common undersized worker. It would be sufficient tax on the credibility if the differences of queen and worker were only those of degree. If the queen were nothing but a large-sized worker-bee, in whom certain organs—which were atrophied in the worker—had received their full development, it would be a fact within comprehension; but the queen differs from the worker not only in size and the capability of her organism, but also on several important points of structure. And how can mere food and air and circumstance produce structural change? The worker has many bodily appliances, special members ingeniously adapted to her daily tasks, of which the queen is wholly destitute; while the physical organism of the queen varies from that of the worker in several important degrees.
Some of these must be enumerated. The abdomen of the worker is comparatively short and rounded: that of the queen is larger and longer, and comes to a fairly sharp point. The jaws of the queen are notched on their inner cutting edge: the worker’s jaws are smooth like the edge of a knife. The tongue of the worker has a spatula at its extremity, and is furnished with sensitive hairs: the tongue of the queen is shorter, the spatula is smaller, while the hairs show greater length. The worker-bee has a complicated system of wax-secreting discs under the horny plates of her abdomen: in the queen these are absent, nor can the most elementary trace of them be discovered. In their nerve-systems the two show difference, the queen possessing only four abdominal ganglia, while the worker has five. The queen’s sting is curved, and longer than the worker’s: the sting of the worker-bee is perfectly straight. On their hind-legs the workers have a curious contrivance which bee-keepers have named the pollen-basket. It is a hollowing of the thigh, the cavity being surrounded with stiff hairs; and within this the pollen is packed and carried home to the hive. In the queen both the cavity and the hairs are absent. Her colour also is generally different from that of the worker-bee, her legs, in particular, being a much redder brown.
Here is a problem for our great biologists—a problem, however, at which the plain, every-day man may well flinch. For we seem to have come face to face with new principles of organic life, facts incompatible with the accepted ideas of the inevitable relation between cause and effect. The irresistible tendency at this stage is to hark back; to repeat the experiment of the transposed eggs, and see whether no vital, initial circumstance has been overlooked. But the result is always the same. Nor can the most careful microscopical dissection of the eggs themselves reveal any differences. In this mystery of the structural variance between queen and worker, it would seem that we are forced to accept one of three alternatives. Either the egg contains two distinct germs of life, one developing only under the stress of hard times, the other only to the call of luxury. Or we must go back to mediæval notions, and believe that the worker-bees give or withhold some vital principle of their own during nurturing operations. Or we must give up the problem, and decide that creation works on lines very different from those on which we have hitherto grounded our faith.
The difficulty is further complicated by the fact that this change of nature does not take place until relatively late in the life of the bee. The egg is three days in hatching. But the young larva is at least three more days old before nature has made the irrevocable step along either of the divergent ways. For the experiment of transposition can be made with exactly the same result if undertaken with female bee-larvæ not more than three days old, instead of the unhatched eggs. Indeed, this is an operation that the nurse-bees themselves perform, on occasion. If a hive loses its queen, and it happens that all the eggs in the worker-cells are hatched out, the bees will breed another queen from any one of the worker-larva available. This is generally successful when the young grub has not passed the three days’ limit. But, even when all the larvæ of the hive are older than this, the bees will still attempt the task, knowing well that, without a queen, the colony must perish. In this case, however, the resulting queen will be defective in various ways. Probably she will never be capable of fertilisation, and therefore the breed of worker-bees will be cut off at its source. Unless the bee-master supplies the colony with a new queen, properly fecundated, the hive will gradually fill up with drones, the old worker-bees will die off, and the stock must ultimately become extinct.
When once the study of the inner life of the honey-bee has been undertaken, the watcher will soon realise that he has embarked on a stranger voyage than he ever contemplated, even in his most daring moments. In the old bee-garden there was a serenity, a quiet enduring bliss of ignorance, that chimed in well with his slothful, holiday mood. The sunshine, the flowers, the song of the wind in the tree-tops, and the drowsy song of the hives; the voice of the old white-headed cottager weaving in his listener’s ear the old, comfortable arabesque of error; the sudden, jubilant uproar of a swarm, filling the blue sky with music and the flash of unnumbered wings; the night-quiet, with its deep underground bee-murmur, its dim half-moon peering over the hill-top, the shadowy bent figure of the old beeman listening at hive-doors for the battle-cry of rival queens, that should mean trouble on the morrow—it all comes back to the watcher now as a haven he has left inconsiderately, for a voyage over unknown, stormy seas. For now, with the inner life of the hive going on unmasked before his very eyes, wonder succeeds wonder almost without a break; and each new fact that reveals itself is more perturbing, because more destructive of old, hallowed convention, than any that has gone before.
The hive that has lost its mother-bee, and failed to provide her with a fully developed, fertile successor, is seen to be rapidly declining in its worker-population, while the horde of drones is increasing at a greater rate than ever. But where do these drones come from, if the very fount of bee-life has been dried up at its source by the loss of a fertilised queen? The question brings the student to what is perhaps the most remarkable fact in the whole great book of natural history.
We are not concerned, for the moment, with theological matters; nor will the thread of the story of the honey-bee be laid down, however briefly, for an excursion into the pulpit. Yet here is something that may well give wherewithal for thought. For nearly two thousand years the Doctrine of the Virgin Birth has been the centre of a bitter human controversy. Its liegemen uphold it as a main article of faith, eternally exalted from the odious need of proof; its temperate opposers sadly and quietly set it aside as a natural impossibility. On one side the charge is want of faith; on the other of blind credulity. And yet no one seems to have thought of looking into paths of creation other than human, to see if no parallel exists that may help both sides, and send the swords to sheath before a common mystery. The honey-bee is small among the fowls, but here she looms large in the world, a portentous symbol. It is a fact, now incontestably proved, that the virgin queen-bee is capable of reproducing her kind, yet only the male of the species. If she is born late in the year, when no drones exist, and her fertilisation is therefore impossible, or if some imperfection of wing prevents her going out for her mating-flight, she will still set busily to work at her one function of egg-laying; and these eggs will all hatch out into male bees. The same thing occurs in the case of the queenless hive, which, having neither worker-egg nor worker-grub, whose age is under the three days’ limit, yet tries to raise a new queen from a larva perhaps four or even five days old. The queen thus created is queen only in name. She may have her ovaries completely developed, but otherwise she will be congenitally destitute. She will have neither the will nor power to receive the drone; and the eggs that she lays so industriously only add to the crowd of useless males that will soon be the sole representatives of the doomed household.
Following the progress of a bee-colony through the mounting days of spring, we see, with every week that passes, a larger area of comb occupied by the young worker-brood; while about the middle of April the queen pays her first visit to the drone-combs, laying a single egg in each cell, as with the rest. It is commonly supposed that the queen is always surrounded by an adulatory retinue, each attendant bee keeping her head respectfully towards her sovereign, and backing before her as she progresses over the combs. Something of this sort is constantly seen during breeding-time, but at other seasons the queen ordinarily receives little attention, passing to and fro in the hive with no more ceremony than is bestowed on any other of the bees. The mediæval writers were aware that the queen had these attendants, and believed them always to be twelve in number, representing the twelve Apostles. A little observation, however, will soon make it clear that the bees which surround the queen on her egg-laying journeys are neither devotees nor courtiers. They are actually her guides, her keepers. The queen’s movements are all prompted by the incessant strokings and pushings and gentle touches of the antennæ that she receives from these. Thus they allow her free passage over the combs, but stop her at each vacant cell, gathering close about her, evidently with the most absorbing anxiety and interest in the operation. First, she peers into the cell, examining it carefully. Then she rears; the bees give way before her; she takes a step or two onward until the end of her body is over the cell. And then she thrusts her abdomen deep into it, pauses a moment, mounts again upon the comb, and the attendant bees at once resume charge of her, and manœuvre her towards the next empty cell. This process never seems hurried, and yet in the height of the breeding season it must go on at an extraordinary pace. It is well attested that a good queen will thus furnish as many as two thousand to three thousand cells in a day, which gives an average of two eggs a minute, even supposing her to keep at the work without pause for the whole twenty-four hours.
The cells designed to contain the worker-brood measure one-fifth of an inch across the mouth; drone cells are larger, having a diameter of a quarter-inch, as well as greater depth. The queen may pass from one species of comb to the other, but she seldom makes a mistake. The egg deposited in the worker-cell hatches out a female; that which is laid in the larger cell becomes a drone, or male bee. Obviously the deposition of the different kinds of eggs is well under the control of the queen. It will be also seen that not only does the mother bee lay either male or female eggs at will, but their number also is subject to her discrimination. From the time when she begins ovipositing, until she reaches her period of greatest activity in early summer, the increase of the colony is not regular, but goes by fits and starts according to the weather, or the amount of incoming food. If the new honey is steadily mounting up in the storehouse, and pollen is plentiful, the work of brood-raising will go freely ahead; but if unseasonable cold stops the work of the foragers, this will immediately affect the output of the queen, and under exceptionally adverse conditions egg-laying may be entirely arrested. This may also take place in the height of the season, and in full favour of sunshine and plenty, if the hive is a small one, and the limit of its capacity has been reached. The combs will then be full of either honey or brood, and the queen must wait until laying space can be cleared for her. That she is able to do this—that her powers can be augmented or restrained, according to the needs of the colony, and that the proportion of the sexes in the hive can be varied at will to suit like contingencies—can only be understood when the details of her life-history have been passed under review.
In the normal, prosperous colony, which we are now studying, the queen will be in her prime, and under natural conditions will remain at the head of affairs until she goes out with the first swarm in May or June. A queen-bee is at the zenith of her fecundity in the second year of her life. After that, her egg-laying powers steadily decline, although she may live to be four, or even five, years old. But the authorities in a hive rarely allow a mother-bee to retain her position after she has shown signs of waning energy. Preparations are at once set on foot for the raising of another queen.
A very old queen will have lost her power to lay worker-eggs, and will have become nothing but a drone-breeder. But the bees are seldom caught napping in this way. Long before this happens the building of the royal cells will have commenced in the hive. A queen-cell has been likened, by various writers, to an acorn, and when half completed it bears a very close resemblance, both in size and shape, to an inverted acorn-cup. This is commonly hung mouth downwards at the side or base of one of the central brood-combs, but it may be placed right in the middle of the comb, in which case the cells around it are cut away to give it air and space. Whether the old queen herself deposits the egg in the royal cell—thus unwittingly supplying the means for her own future dethronement—or whether the worker-bees transfer to it an egg or grub from a common cell, is not yet finally ascertained. As, however, the mere sight of a royal cell usually excites the queen to fury, the chances are that she is never allowed to approach it at any time, and the egg would then be placed there by the worker-bees. But, in the great majority of cases, it is probable that new queens are raised by enlarging an already existing worker-cell, in which an egg has been previously deposited. As far as is known, this is always the case when a young grub is used for the purpose instead of an egg. It is possible, also, that the queen is physically incapable of laying in a royal cell an egg that will produce a female bee; but this curious point will be touched upon at a later stage.
The old trite saying among beemen, that bees never do anything invariably, receives constant illustration in any near study of the ways of the honey-bee. It has been seen that a colony deprived of its queen, and having no worker-egg or grub less than three days old wherewith to make good its deficiency, is commonly doomed to early extinction. But, on rare occasions, colonies supposed to be in this plight will make an unexpected and inexplicable recovery. After a period of the doldrums, extending for three weeks or more, a sudden renewed activity and exhilaration is observable in the hive. The pollen-bearers, who have been hitherto almost idle, resume their busy work; and, on the hive being opened, all the evidences of the presence of a fertile, laying queen-mother are again to be seen. In many instances in which a new lease of life has thus been vouchsafed to a colony under what seems an inexorable ban, no doubt appearances have been deceptive. The bees may have discovered in their midst a worker-larva not yet too far advanced for promotion to queenship, and thus have achieved their salvation at the eleventh hour. But, in at least one case, the testimony against the possibility of this seems complete. A nucleus stock, containing only three or four small combs and only about five hundred bees, was deprived of its queen. Ten days later every queen-cell that had been formed in the interval was destroyed, leaving in the hive not a single egg or bee in the larval state. Nevertheless, on the hive being opened after a further period of eighteen days, one new queen-cell containing an egg was discovered. And this egg duly hatched out into a fine, well-developed queen-bee. Assuming the facts to be true, and they seem to be incontrovertible, there is only one inference to be drawn from this: some enterprising bee of the colony must have gone to another hive and either begged, borrowed, or stolen a worker-egg. Apiarian scientists very rightly hesitate to ascribe to the honey-bee surpassing ingenuity of this kind on the testimony of a single case, however well authenticated. But other instances are on record nearly as indubitable, and as it is an unquestioned fact that worker-bees will carry eggs about from comb to comb within the space of their own hive, it does not seem wholly incredible that they may visit other hives in the immediate neighbourhood, especially when impelled to extra resourcefulness by so vital a need. The whole question is interesting in more ways than one, as it seems to bear very trenchantly on the problem of “Reason versus Instinct,” now busy in the thoughts of most modern naturalists.
In whatever way the egg for the queen-cell may be furnished by the stock intending to raise a new mother-bee, the first sign of life is always the same—a tiny, white, elongated speck, glued on end to the base, or what must rather be called the roof, of the inverted cell-cup. In this state it remains about three days, when the larva hatches out, and at once the special treatment accorded to the young queen begins. She is loaded with rich provender from the first moment of her existence, living literally up to the eyes in the white, shining, jelly-like substance that the nurse-bees are continually regurgitating and pouring into the cells. This superfeeding process is continued for about five days, when the larva has reached its full growth and the cell its greatest dimensions. The larva then stops feeding to spin itself a silken shroud before changing into the pupa state, and the bees seal up the door of the cell. In its completed state the cell loses its resemblance to an acorn, and is rather to be likened to a fir-cone. In the case of the common workers and drones, the cells are made of pure wax, only the capping being of mingled wax and pollen; but the queen cell is constructed throughout of this porous material.
The fully grown queen-bee is ready, and more than anxious to leave her cradle-cell in about fifteen or sixteen days after the laying of the egg. The bees, however, generally give her a first lesson in obedience even at this early point in her career. It is a critical time in the history of the hive, and much thought and care have been bestowed on the complicated business in hand. In the first place, it would never have done to allow the whole future welfare of the colony to depend on a single life alone. Therefore not one queen has been raised, but several. As many as five or six queens may be ready to hatch out in different parts of the brood-nest, and none of them will be permitted to break from her cell until the appointed time arrives. For each the cradle now becomes a prison. A small hole is bored in the cell-wall, through which the impatient captive is fed, pending the day when she is to be allowed her liberty; and close guard and watch is kept over each cell to save it from the violence of the old queen, who is becoming hourly more restless and suspicious.
The complete subjection of the mother-bee to the ruling worker-class in the hive receives here a striking confirmation. She is a true exemplar of a prevailing kind of femininity—comely of person, untutored in mind, an inveterate stay-at-home, a prolific mother; and now there awakens in her the sounding chord of jealousy. Left free to act on her own impulses, she would soon bring about a speedy end to all the careful, long-sighted preparations within the hive. She would tear open each royal cell, and with one thrust of the curved, cruel scimitar that queen-bees use only on their equals in rank, its occupant would be ruthlessly despatched, and her own supremacy reinstated. But an impassable barrier stops the way—the collective will of the hive. The violent delight of killing has once been hers; she will never know it again. Now her own fate is in the balance. It may be death, or a new life in a new home: all depends on the deliberate decree of those who have made her, and who now use or discard her, for their own purposes. If it be late spring, and the condition of the stock warrant it, this governing spirit may decide for colonisation, and the old queen may be disposed of by sending her off with a swarm. But other counsels may prevail. The times may be unripe, or the weather inopportune. And then Fate, in the shape of a merciless application of principles, will descend upon her, and her own wise children will ruthlessly put her to death.
This State-execution of the queen, at the first sign of waning fertility, is a peculiarly pathetic as well as a tragic phase of bee-life. The stern, soured amazons of the hive must have their systems and conventions in everything they undertake; and they cannot even bring about the supersession of the old queen without due circumstance and ceremonial. Given that it would be against the best interests of the common weal that she should retain her life after the loss of her queenhood, one swift stroke would immediately determine the matter, and the law—that there shall be no useless members in the bee-republic—would have its due fulfilment. But old tradition rules that the queen shall suffer no violence from the weapons of the common herd. She is to die, but her death must be brought about in another way. And so the fawning executioners gather round her, locking her in an embrace that tightens with every moment, until the breath is literally hugged out of her body. All her life has been spent in the midst of caresses, and now she is to die of them, close held to the last in that silent, terrible grip.
In the heat and glow of the fine June morning you may see her, the young virgin queen, making ready for her nuptial flight.
At first she is all hesitancy; wandering to and fro amidst the crowd on the hive-threshold; coquetting with the sunshine; loath to return to the dim, pent, murmurous twilight she has forsaken, yet hardly daring to launch herself on wings that are still untried.
For three long days and nights since her release from the prison-cell she has been a curiously solitary figure in the busy throng within the hive. Instead of the enthusiastic, welcoming world she expected, she finds none but unregarding strangers about her. Not a drone glances her way, and the worker-bees go upon their business in seeming unconcern at her presence. They do not even trouble themselves to feed her, and she is left to forage for herself as best she may. A conspiracy of indifference is on the clan—all part of a deep design for her education, if she only knew it, but singularly damping to the ardours, and great ideas of destiny, that gather within her day by day. At length the call comes for which all are secretly waiting, and obeying irresistibly, she presses out into the light.
As she stands hesitating, the hot June sun falls upon her, laving her in molten gold. The blue sky beckons her upward. All the world of colour and incense and life calls her to her wooing, and she must needs obey. With a little glad flutter of the wings, she breaks at last from the scrambling company about her, and soars up into the light.
Warily now she hovers, taking careful stock of her home and its surroundings. Then round and round, in ever widening and lifting circles, each sweep upward giving her a broader view of the world that lies beyond. And then away into the blue sky so swiftly that no human eye can follow; yet only for a short flight. She is back again now, almost before you have missed her, and hurrying, frightened at her own audacity, into the old safe gloom of the hive.
Thus she dallies, to and fro between the sunshine and the darkness, each time adventuring a little farther into the blue playground of the upper air, until at length the inevitable comes to pass. A great drone—one of the roistering crowd that fills the bee-garden with its hoarse noontide music—spies her, and gives instant chase. At sight of him she wheels, and darts away into the sunshine at lightning speed. Yet the first drone has hardly stretched a wing before another is after him, and still another. Thick and fast from all points they gather for the race, until the fleeing queen has drawn a whole bevy of them, streaming like a little grey cloud behind her. This much you can see as you strain your eyes in their track; but in a moment quarry and huntsmen have vanished together, volleying, as it seemed, straight up into the farthermost skies.
From her birth to the day when that terrible, living cordon closes about her, almost the whole life of the queen-bee can be followed step by step. Only this one moment of her bridal stands unrevealed, and perhaps for ever unrevealable, to human eyes. You can picture to yourself the wild chevy-chase through the clear June air and sunshine; you can give, in fancy, the prize to the strongest and the fleetest; but all you will know for certain is that in a little while the queen returns to the hive, sobered and solitary, trailing behind her infallible evidence of her impregnation and the death of the victorious drone. She has been the bride of a moment; now she is to be the widow of a lifetime. Henceforward her days are to be spent in the twilight cloisters of the hive, flying abroad so rarely that many an old experienced beeman will say she comes forth only once a year when she leads a swarm. But in her body now she carries the seed from which will spring up a whole nation. Before her marriage-flight she was the least considered of all the colony; now she is welcomed home with public ovation; lauded, fed, and fondled; set up in the high place, a living symbol of the tens of thousands unborn. As in olden, savage times, the royal festivals had their human sacrifices, so this paramount day in the perfected communism of the bee-people must vent its rejoicing in slaughter. But it is not tribute of common slaves that is now to redden the State-shambles, nor will the work fall to the common executioner’s knife. There are captive queens in the citadel—a royal sacrifice ready to hand, and a royal blade hungering for the task. Once the queen has proved her intrinsic motherhood, and the first few worker-eggs have been laid in the comb, the guards will stand away from the royal prison-cells and let her wreak her will upon them. It is all very ghastly in a miniature way, yet very queenly, as old traditions of human queenhood go. She gives over her nursery-work gladly enough for a moment, and flies to the slaughter, tearing down the prison-doors, and putting each clamorous captive fiercely to the sword.
Apart from this tragic element of sororicide, quickly over and soon forgotten in the general rejoicing, there is true romance in the early life-story of the Queen of the Bees—bridehood, wifehood, widowhood, following hard upon each other, all in the space of a single hour. But in the details of her common everyday life that succeed this tense period, above all in the wonderful structure of her body and its functions, there is greater romance still. That she has but a single commerce with the drone, and thereafter is exalted to perpetual fecundity; that, through her, sons and daughters can be given to the hive in just the proportion needed for the good of the State, or that increase of population can be wholly arrested at will, are facts to be accredited only after sure knowledge. And to understand how these results are brought about, it is necessary to learn something of the anatomy, as well as the manner of fecundation, of the mother-bee.
In the first place, as fertilisation of the one sex by the other is usually regarded, the queen-bee is not fertilised at all. The vital essence of the drone does not penetrate the ovaries of the queen, but passes immediately after coition into a receptacle specially provided for it, where it is stored, and its effectiveness preserved, during nearly the whole lifetime of the queen. It has been shown that the virgin queen is able to lay eggs from which only drones, or male bees, originate. The fecundated queen, however, can lay both male and female eggs, and she has the power of depositing either kind when and wherever she wills. The whole thing, amazing as it is, and far-reaching in its results, has, like many other extraordinary devices in nature, a simple explanation. The gland wherein is stored the male life-essence, can be opened or closed at the will of the mother-bee, or rather, as will be shown, according to circumstances that for the moment involuntarily but inexorably guide her. When she is brought to the large drone-cell, this gland remains shut, and the egg escapes without contact with its contents. But at the narrow worker-cells the gland in the oviduct is opened, and the egg, in passing, absorbs some of its containing germs. Thus only the female bee is born of the union of the two parents; the male bee is the offspring of mother alone.
Of this primal incident, the parthenogenesis, or birth of the fully equipped male from the virgin female, little more can be said than that it is a well-ascertained fact of nature, exemplified in several other insects beside the honey-bee. But while we are witnessing the part played in the hive by the fecundated queen, with her elaborate organism, much is to be noted; and here we really get the master-key to a right understanding of the whole system of bee-government. It would be an anomaly if the highest, most important functions of the State had been entrusted solely to the queen, whose feeble intelligence renders her, of all others, least likely to execute them properly; and we find, in fact, that no such reliance is placed on her. The worker-bees, who take her in charge on her return from her mating-flight, henceforth originate her every act and impulse. It has already been seen how she is led from cell to cell over the combs; how she is caused to lay, in earliest spring, only a few eggs a day, while in the summer she may produce several thousand; and how her output may be checked or augmented at any point between. Now we are to realise how it is all brought about; or, at least, bring conjecture as near to certainty as may be with so difficult a theme.
During the first two days of her life as a perfect insect, we saw the young virgin queen mingling with the throng in the hive almost unnoticed, and left to seek her own food from the common store like the rest. But now that her fecundation has been achieved, she has a whole suite of chamber-women, whose principal duty is to attend to her nourishment. From their mouths they feed her, giving her, in all probability, the same rich substance that was administered to her when but a larva in the cell. This bee-milk consists mainly of honey and pollen pre-digested, but it has been proved that its composition can be altered at will by the ministering bees. Additions to it are made, either separately, or combined in varying proportions, from three or four distinct glands, each of which exudes a liquid differing in nature from that of the rest. The particular kind of nourishment given to a queen who is to be urged on in the work of egg-laying, has the effect of stimulating her ovaries. The more food of this kind she receives, the greater will be her prolificacy. On the other hand, a diminishing allowance will mean a corresponding decrease in her egg-laying powers; while, if this rich diet be withheld altogether, and she is forced to help herself from the honey-cells, the development of these eggs may cease entirely, as it actually does in the coldest time of the year. Thus the bees play upon her, producing just the music needed for their purposes. As the days lengthen, and the spring sun gets higher and warmer, they gradually waken her docile nature to its one paramount task. In the flaming weeks of summer she sits at an unending banquet. And when autumn comes, with its chilly nights and steadily failing sun-glow, the generous fare is slowly withdrawn; her retinue thins and disperses; at length she becomes a solitary, unmarked wanderer again, sipping, with the commonest worker, at the plain household sweets.
How the proportion of the sexes is so unerringly regulated by the hive-authorities through their influence on the mother-bee, is not so readily explained; nor can it be at present more than shrewd conjecture, a backward reckoning from effect to cause. Probably the opening or closing of the fertilising gland, which decides the sex of the egg, is automatic, the attitude of the mother-bee during oviposition determining its action. When she enters the narrow worker-cells, her body is necessarily straightened, and this may produce pressure on the fecundating gland, resulting in the impregnation of the egg. But in the wider drone-cell no such constricted posture is needful, and the egg may therefore pass untouched by the fructifying germ. If this version of the matter be accepted, the natural inference is that either the mother-bee is incapable of laying female eggs in the cells specially constructed for raising queens—these being the largest of all,—or that there is something in the peculiar curve of the cell-cup which compels her to straighten her body in the act, and so brings about the same posture as with the narrow worker-cells.
This theory, although at present the most plausible, has received, it is true, little confirmation in fact. No one, apparently, has ever seen the mother-bee lay in a queen-cell, nor has the transportation thither of a worker-egg by the bees actually been witnessed. To cling to the old idea of the supremacy of the queen-bee, giving her the power and ability of a despotic, all-wise sovereign, would, of course, set this and many other vexed questions at rest. Nothing, however marvellous, would be too much to expect of her. But the farther the student of bee-life goes in his absorbing subject, the more impossible the old notion seems. Proof comes to him with every hour that the mother-bee is virtually a servant, and never a ruler in the hive; and just as assured testimony reaches him of the universal potency of the worker-bees. All else that takes place within the hive is brought about by their collective will and agency; and it would be strange indeed if this vital matter of progeneration were not subject to the same controlling force.