The History of the King Bee

I

HONEYCOMB is made up of cells of two sizes, the larger being used for the raising of drones, which are male, while the others serve for the smaller and more numerous workers. These latter, though practically neuter, because of their arrested sexual development, are essentially female.

As each of these varieties of cells affords just enough room to accommodate a full-grown grub of the sex for which it is intended, it is necessary that each shall receive an egg according to its kind; and in this particular the queen makes no mistake. She lays a male egg in each of the larger cells, and a female in each of the smaller.

That an animal can have this ability to produce one sex or the other in conformity with some outer circumstance is rather hard to believe. It does not fit in with our accustomed analogies. But the fact takes place without explanation or apology; and when we patiently look into other facts in hope of explaining this one, we find, as is so often the case with science, that we have stepped into a new theatre of wonders.

A virgin queen — one that has by no possible chance become impregnated — can lay eggs and produce young quite as readily as an animal that has become a mother in the usual way. But her eggs will produce only the drones, or males. The virgin queen will have all sons and no daughters. But after she has met the male, in what is known as her ‘wedding flight,’ she can lay eggs of either kind.

From this it becomes evident that the male eggs laid by a queen after she has been fertilized are eggs untouched by the father’s substance, being the same that she laid when she was a virgin. It is only for the production of daughters that the male help is necessary. And the female eggs which she lays are the same as the others except that she has brought them into contact with a supply of the male principle. She holds in her body a lifetime supply of the sperm acquired in her wedding flight, and she can apply it or withhold it according as circumstances require. That this is the truth of the matter has long ceased to be a matter of doubt. The modern microscope has enabled investigators to arrive at the inner facts, looking closely at queen bees and their eggs under the various conditions.

There has been much speculation as to whether a queen discriminates between the large cells and the small by an act that is mental or by some influence that is purely physical. Does she do it by particular observation and an act of will, or are we rather to conclude that the different widths of the cells act upon her muscles in such a way as to fertilize the egg in one case and in the other leave it untouched? Is the queen using intelligence or is she a mere automaton? This is a point which remains a mystery.

For a long time after the facts had been determined, any such statement of the powers of the queen bee was received with skepticism not only among practical beekeepers but among scientists who had had other theories. That a queen bee could receive from the male a store of sperm sufficient to last her throughout the four or five years of her life, and that she could fertilize hundreds of thousands of eggs and so make them female, and withhold the sperm from others, which would in consequence be male, was considered ridiculous — preposterous. It was another of those far-fetched scientific theories.

That the large cells do produce male bees while the smaller ones bring forth female is a fact beyond question; and practical beekeepers, having an everyday familiarity with the circumstances, naturally formed opinions as to how the sex was controlled. And their theory was that it was simply a matter of feeding. The queen, they thought, laid eggs that had no particular leanings in the matter of sex, their original state being neither male nor female; and then, after the eggs had hatched, the nurse bees, by some difference in the food which they carried to the two kinds of cells, caused the little worm in a large cell to grow up as a male and that in a small cell to become a female. If this seems too much to expect of mere victuals, we must remember that the practical beekeeper arrived at this way of reasoning by noting how a queen bee is made; and here we see doings almost as outlandish.

II

A queen bee, or perfect female, although she differs from a worker bee in size, shape, function, and a whole set of instincts, is hatched from the same sort of egg as the worker. The difference is wholly due to feeding. Nurse bees will take any one of the recently hatched larvæ in the small cells, and simply by giving it a different diet and a little more room will cause it to become a queen bee instead of a worker. In fact, any beekeeper can make this change; and among those who raise queen bees for the market it is a matter of everyday practice. The operation consists in transferring one of the young larvæ from one of the small cells into a very large one, a queen cell, which the beekeeper makes artificially; whereupon the nurse bees take note of the change and bring up the little worm as a queen. This explains to us how the practical bee man got his theory that sex was the result of feeding. If food can make certain physical transformation, why cannot it determine those bodily details upon which sex depends? The thing the bee man was already familiar with was enough of a miracle; and by making one miracle cover both cases he felt better satisfied. This was an interesting point in human nature, but it was bad natural history. Laboratory workers absolutely proved the other theory to be right; the queen does determine the sex at the time she lays the egg, even though science cannot tell whether she does it willfully or not. And so the result of scientific progress was to make two miracles grow where only one grew before.

On each of the hind legs of the worker bee is a brush for gathering pollen, and a basket-shaped arrangement for carrying it home. On the legs of the queen bee these tools are lacking. On the abdomen of the worker bee are pockets which extrude the plates of building wax, and on either side of the head is a coiled, intracellular gland which is supposed to be the source of the nitrogenous food which is fed to the young. The queen has neither of these devices. The worker is able to reach into the nectar-bearing chalices of flowers and gather honey, while the queen, with a shorter jaw, can do no such work. The queen is sexually complete, while the workers have but the rudiments of their sex; and along with this egg-laying power of the queen comes an entirely different set of instincts. While the workers are free to go forth and explore the world of flowers, the queen remains a recluse in the hive. A queen is longer and more tapering than a worker, and her wings fall far short, when folded, of reaching the end of her body.

But it is in the mechanism of the sting that we find the most surprising contrast. The worker bee has a straight sting which is a marvel of tool designing. It consists of two barbed spears which fit against one another inside a sheath and are worked by a muscle of their own. They operate by a pumping movement, the spears thrusting forward alternately and thus taking a deeper and deeper hold on the flesh while formic acid flows into the wound from a poison sac. In this way the sting may go on doing its work quite independent of the bee. The sting of a worker bee takes such strong hold that it usually resists the bee’s best efforts to extract it, and when it pulls out of the bee’s body it is likely to bring a part of the intestine with it. In consequence of this loss the bee dies. A queen bee, on the other hand, has a sting that is curved like a scimitar and is easily removed from the wound. It is never lost and may be used repeatedly. But, though she has this formidable-looking weapon, a queen may be handled without fear. The sole function of her weapon is to kill rival queens. She is not a defender of the hive, and so she lacks entirely the instinct of stinging.

In these instances we see two creatures with quite different tool equipment — a fitting of the means to the end as by an intellectual response to what is needed. Yet it is all due to the giving to one of a richer food than to the other. The same egg that produced the worker would have produced the queen provided the little worm had been given a more liberal supply of the nitrogenous element gathered from the flowers. And yet the same egg, naturally a male, would have produced a drone had not the touch of fertilizing sperm transformed the male into the female. It is all quite incredible, but yet a fact. It is easy to conceive of food being seized upon by the life forces and used as building material or as fuel, but how can it be the guiding factor in determining a machine design? We naturally think of an ingenious tool as being an invention, a product of thought; and then when we look upon the queen’s curved scimitar and compare it with the sting of the worker we wonder whether it is proper to ask the question, How much does nitrogen know? In what secret recesses of the elements, in what ultimate interstices of carbon and hydrogen and nitrogen does the mystery of life hide itself? Certainly this seems to be a great deal for mere victuals to do! It is simply a fact.

When a queen is five or six days out of the cell in which she was hatched, and is about to become the active head of the hive, she takes what is known as the ‘wedding flight,’ high in air. It is the only time in her life that she leaves the hive without the swarm. In this high, swift flight she is pursued by drone bees, the strongest flier among the number finally catching her; and when she has been impregnated she turns back toward the hive, while the male, having done her a lifetime service, drops dead in mid-air. And though a queen usually lives and remains active until sometime in her fourth year, and though she can, at the height of the season, lay more than three thousand eggs a day, she is able to touch each egg that she drops in a worker cell with its own small share of the dead father’s substance! She is now practically both male and female, both married and unmarried, the virgin nature giving life to sons, and the male principle, which she holds in store, giving the magic touch which turns a passing egg from male to female.

This most important bee of the swarm, easily distinguished by her general appearance, is constantly engaged, during the honey season, in laying eggs. As she goes round and round over the surface of the comb, she is accompanied by special attendants, often likened to a royal escort, whose duty it is to feed her. There may be fifty or sixty thousand brood cells in the hive which need to be gone over once in twenty-one days, that being the time it takes for an egg to develop into a bee and leave the cell vacant; and such constant production of eggs would be impossible without a constant supply of food. When she comes to the mouth of an empty cell she thrusts her head into it as if to satisfy herself that it is in proper condition; and then she bends her body and deposits an egg in the bottom. And this routine she keeps up with the monotonous regularity of a weaver throwing his shuttle, or a woman taking stitches in a taboret.

As a farmer must make hay while the sun shines, so the bee must do the year’s work while the flowers are in bloom. If there is not a great multitude of these short-lived workers in May and June, there will not be enough honey to carry the clustered swarm through the dark months of winter; and besides, there must be a surplus of children in order that migrating swarms may go out and increase the number of colonies in the world. This is fundamental in the economy of nature. The trees in the orchard, like the clover in the field and the vegetables in the garden, have got to be impregnated in order that they may bear; for male and female created He them. As man lives largely upon the young of others, — grain, nuts, fruit, and eggs, — and even the meat which seems to make him independent of the plant is itself the product of grain, it is most important to him that the winged commerce be carried on. Summer’s mission has not begun until by some device there has been a meeting between the plants; and so much of this work devolves upon the bee that it may be said not to live for itself at all, but fundamentally for plants. And ultimately for man. Not even a pickle can get on the table except by the intervention of the queen’s offspring. The pickle, as sour as it may have become, has had to provide a drop of honey as bounty to its bee.

A bee’s egg, hardly visible at the bottom of the cell, hatches in three or four days and becomes a small white worm. The nurse bees feed the little worm on a milky jelly specially secreted, and after three days of this food they change the diet to a half-digested mixture of honey and pollen. The result of such care is that the little white worm is soon a big, fat grub entirely filling its allotted quarters in the comb; whereupon the nurse bees seal it over with a porous, convex lid, and leave it to undergo the miracle of becoming a bee. In about twenty-one days from the time the egg was laid, the new bee gnaws its way through the lid and steps forth, somewhat pale and delicate-looking, but all complete. It is now ready to begin a career of steady loafing, if it is a drone, or, if it is of the other variety, to start to work at once and lend a hand in the raising of more bees. But if it is to be a queen bee, the feeding of the royal jelly is kept up, instead of being stopped at the end of three days, and the queen is complete in about sixteen days instead of twenty-one.

III

From this general view of the state of marriage in the hive (the whole complexity of which I have tried to convey in the shortest possible form) the reader will now readily understand why it was that up to quite recent times, and despite the fact that the human race had been paying attention to the bee from the earliest ages, not one fact was ever discovered regarding the sex of bees. And yet the mysteries of bee life were a continual source of speculation. Virgil, who was born on the fifteenth day of October of the year 70 B.C., and whose two thousandth birthday was recently a live topic in the newspapers, reflected the whole biological knowledge of his day when he represented the bees as having no sex at all. The young, it was then thought, were somehow generated from the inner material of flowers. He says: —

Here we observe, instead of complete ignorance, a certain knowledge of the bee. Somehow the ancients had learned that there is no sexual intercourse in the hive — and how they learned that in a day when the observation hive had not been invented is more than I can imagine. And this belief, even upon the strongest circumstantial evidence, might have been difficult were it not that the age accepted without question the doctrine of spontaneous generation.

From Virgil we learn that man could himself cause nature to bring forth bees in case the hives became weak in population. All that was necessary was to kill a fine young bull and allow it to decay under a shed. The ancient Greeks believed that, as flies spring by spontaneous generation from rotting meat, so the bee, which goes through the maggot form, could be had from the special carcass of a young bull. In the fourth book of the Georgics, which is devoted wholly to beekeeping, we have a full account of this method of replenishing the swarms, and how it was revealed to the human race from the lips of Proteus. It has been said that the fourth book of the Georgics is the greatest book on bees ever written; but when we consider that exactly one half of it is taken up with this matter of creating bees from bulls, and that the actual information in the other half might easily be written on one page, this opinion would hardly seem to come from one who had taken the trouble to read the Georgics. It is a supreme achievement in poetry, but hardly to be recommended to one who is looking for information about the bee.

Virgil’s knowledge of the bee was essentially the same as that of Aristotle, who wrote three hundred years before him, and about the same as that of Tusser, who wrote during the time of Shakespeare. All this while the human mind had before it the familiar problem of the bee — the mystery of its sex and the inscrutable way in which it produced its young. And this is to say nothing of all the sugarless centuries before Aristotle, during which the bees were as much a matter of concern to the Oriental husbandman as were his oxen or his sheep.

To all these men and the people of their times, that principal bee of the swarm, catching the eye by its distinctive size and shape, was known as the King Bee. And here a question asks itself: If they knew nothing whatever of the sex of bees, how could they agree so unanimously, and so long, that this one was a male? This question, asking itself, answers itself quite as easily. This bee was the most important bee in the hive; hence it must be of the masculine kind. It had influence and a large following; hence it was ordained by nature to be a monarch. And if this sort of reasoning does not fall in with the spirit of the present generation of thinkers, we must make allowance for quite recent developments in history. The sex of this bee was settled on grounds not of nature but of human nature.

The bee has always been used to point a moral. In the respect that it is industrious it has served as an example for the people; and in the respect that the bee is an obedient citizen and a loyal soldier it has been held up as the pattern of orderly government. The word ‘royal’ recurs often in all bee literature, the monarch being fed on royal jelly and attended by the royal escort; and so it was only natural that actual kings and queens looked upon the bee as giving countenance to their own human status. The hive became the prototype of royal sway. And while the kings were using the bee as the symbol of their craft, — the House of Valois making conquest in garments embroidered with aureate bees, and bearing the assuring motto, ‘The king bee has no sting, ’ and even Napoleon adopting the golden bee as if it were Nature’s stamp and seal attesting the validity of his form of government, — the supposed kings in the beehives of the world were going their perpetual rounds from empty cell to empty cell and doing their best to keep up with their task of laying eggs.

IV

From the very first, the bee has been not merely an insect, but a point of view. But times change. And one of the ways in which we of the modern age differ from Aristotle and Virgil and Shakespeare is that we no longer believe in a king bee. When the swarm is alluded to by the modern mind it is always in the terms of democracy. The bee, we are told, is ‘a highly socialized insect.’ The swarm illustrates the working out of human interests and is a model of coöperation. We no longer say of the bees, with Shakespeare, that ‘they have a king and officers of sorts,’ nor do we agree with his Archbishop of Canterbury that the order and obedience there exhibited are Nature’s pattern for princes and their subjects. We are more likely to be informed that in a bee community the children are the property of the state, and cared for in common. Thus the bee, but yesterday a Royalist, is well on its way to becoming a Communist. For these are the days of the twilight of the kings. Inside the hive as well as out, it is the Ragnarok of royalty.

The world is full of meanings, of established symbols and ready-made points of view. We are born into a secondhand universe, a world that has been too much used by others. Language itself is but the labels that have been pasted on things by poets, preachers, and propagandists, and by the time we arrive on the scene we are expected to see it through ‘ the spectacles of books.’

Now the plain truth regarding bees is that the principal bee of the swarm is neither a king nor a queen nor the head of a ‘community’; neither democratic, aristocratic, nor socialist. She is simply the mother of the whole lot. Whether there be forty or fifty or sixty thousand of them, they are all her children. The daughters all remain at home and are brought up as spinsters so that they may tend to the work of bringing up the young. If a beehive is to be given any sort of poetic twist, we must say that it is a monument to the sacredness of the family.

If a gold-banded Italian queen be put into a colony of German or black bees, in place of their own queen, it will be but thirty-five days before the whole swarm will consist of pure-bred Italian bees and there will not be a black bee left. The reason will be, of course, that the fertilized Italian queen lays eggs that are purely the product of herself and the Italian drone which she met on her wedding flight. The black bees will simply be engaged in bringing up her brood. And if a black or German queen, fertilized by a black drone, be put into a swarm of Italians, the swarm will all be black in the same length of time. It was by such experiments and observations that we have been able to determine the maximum length of life of a bee during the working season.

When we consider that the cells of brood comb have eggs in them and that this principal bee of the hive is so constantly engaged in putting them there, we naturally wonder how the beekeepers of the past could all mistake her for a male. We must remember that the hive — whether artificially made of cork or straw or tile or mud, or whether established by the bees themselves in the hollow of a tree — was naturally a place of inner darkness. And if the swarm settled somewhat in the open, as in the cleft of a rock, it would hardly be a place in which the curious-minded observer would care to tarry. To get the honey, the ancient beekeeper had first to destroy the bees. The invention of the observation hive, banishing the darkness in which the bee had usually dwelt, and the perfecting of the modern microscope, spying into spermathecæ and making manifest the infinitely little, discovered in a few years what the ages had been unable to come at.

In the course of time, and before science had become fully equipped to determine the facts, it became rumored that this principal bee was not a king at all, but a member of the other sex. Swammerdam (1637-1680) first ascertained the sex of bees, by dissection; but credit for first publishing the theory should go to an English beekeeper named Butler, who in 1609 published his Feminine Monarchy. It was a novelty of literature which did not attract much attention.

This was at a time when cane sugar was beginning to be plentiful in Europe, and honey, which had heretofore been one of the prime necessities of life, was becoming less important. The four books of Virgil’s Georgics reflect the story of the bee up to this time. They are poetical treatises on the four branches of husbandry — agriculture, arboriculture, cattle raising, and beekeeping: and the fact that the bee is given the same amount of attention as the other subjects attests the great importance of this insect in an age that knew nothing of cane syrup or sugar. Even in Virgil’s time rumors had reached Europe of a ‘reed honey’ made from a plant that grew in India, but as yet the beehive constituted the sugar factory of the world. And when examples of the cane product came to Europe during the Middle Ages, it was in small quantities that were regarded with curiosity and handled as a drug.

As long as Europe knew so little of sugar cane, and in any case had no district that was suited to its growth, the peoples of the Occident, both pagan and Christian, were mainly dependent upon the bee for their sweetening. A New World had to be discovered; and then the sugar cane, specimens of which had been brought to Spain by the Moors, had to prove its adaptability to the West Indies before Europe could begin to have a plentiful supply of sugar.

In Shakespeare’s day, while sugar had ceased to be a drug and a curiosity, and confections were freely made by people who were not apothecaries, the bee still held a place of importance in the world. The great dramatist had evidently never heard of the theory that the principal bee was a female, as propounded in the obscure book brought out in his latter years. His plays show his belief in all the traditions of the king bee. From Virgil to Shakespeare was a stretch of some sixteen hundred years, and in all that time scientists had advanced but little in their knowledge of the hive. The people ate their honey unflavored with the truth. In retrospect, it seems a pity that the modern style of scientific and carefully measured hive, increasing the output of the swarm many times over, had not been invented when the world most needed it. A thousand years ago it would have made its inventor immortal. Two thousand years ago Virgil would have written his name among the gods.

V

Few people, even among those who read bee books with the most practical purposes in mind, get such a final grasp of the nature of the swarm as to have what I should call a bee’s point of view. One day in the summer of 1919 I had an experience with a swarm of bees which made plain to me more than anything else possibly could the ultimate nature of a swarm of bees.

It was on the twelfth day of July, 1919, that I heard the oncoming of a swarm of bees, and saw them arrive and settle on a little slope of false roofing at the corner of my house. The wooden cornice beneath the low eaves continues horizontally for a little distance after it turns the corner of the stone wall, giving a purely decorative touch to each of these corners on the gable end; and this little useless piece of cornice is roofed with a small area of shingle work. It was an ideal landing place for a swarm of bees that had arrived at what they now considered their new home. This was a triangular tunnel or vacant space under the roof which was left after we had partitioned off some upstairs bedrooms; and into this cavity in the architecture they began to disappear through a crack in the cornice. The directness with which they found their way to my house and into this crack was enough to convince any logical mind — which some nature writers do not seem to have — that bees have scouts who have taken observation of suitable places beforehand.

Pretty soon the interesting event at my house had drawn a small audience, my wife deploring that there would be a mess of honey under a part of the roof where it was inaccessible, and that we should have a swarm of bees for many years where we did not want them. She had learned enough about bees to know that a bee’s home is a permanent institution. It remains year after year, no matter how many swarms of older bees migrate from it as the seasons pass.

And then I made a stroke of prophecy. It was a very hot day. Leaning on my hoe, with which I had been touching up the garden, I said I did not believe that the bees would stay there. They would find it so hot in that enclosed space that their comb would melt. And this would cause them to move.

I had myself been up under that roof, in another part, on such a day as this; and I did not believe that the bees would approve of the temperature. And even while we were talking it over the bees began to pour out through the crack and gather en masse on the little slope of shingles. And when they had all come forth they took wing and settled on a small plum tree, from a lowbranch of which they suspended themselves in a big clump. I was somewhat surprised by this immediate fulfilling of my prediction. I had only meant that they would ultimately desert the location, and this by way of consoling my wife. But it was a wonderful piece of prophecy, and it made a due impression on the neighbors.

As I had no bees of my own, but satisfied my whilom curiosity by studying those of a neighbor who had seventy colonies, I decided that they ought to belong to him; and so I telephoned him that I would make him a present of thirty or forty thousand bees provided he would send over a hive properly outfitted with empty comb to tempt them in. About four o’clock in the afternoon there came along a farm boy, barefoot and scantily attired, and wheeling a heavy wheelbarrow on which was the prepared hive. So now I got ready to hive them; and having spread a bed sheet on the grass, and placed the hive in position. I gave the little plum tree a vigorous jolt and saw the big, live clump fall and sort of melt out softly on the sheet. And almost without hesitation the great population, ‘almost a cityful,’ began to flow hiveward.

This flowing of a big swarm toward and into the low entrance of a hive is a spectacle well worth an effort at description if one had the space. As the bees are used to hanging in clumps and walking all over one another, they go along two and three layers deep; they are their own moving sidewalk. And, so going, they give an excellent demonstration of that philosophic concept which the public is now trying so hard to get a grasp of — relative and positive motion. While the top layer of bees is moving at a slow rate of speed relative to the layer of bees on which it is walking, it is making great positive speed toward the entrance of the hive. It is this effortless sliding along that gives the crowd such a mobile and liquidlike sort of flow. What is known as the Wisconsin type of hive has a little porch with an overhanging roof on the gable end, like the original Langstroth hive; and I have wondered whether Langstroth, who was a preacher, was influenced by his lifelong calling to make the first hive so much like a little white church. However this may be, a church is what such a hive looks like; and then it seems a great white temple, capable of holding an inconceivable throng, as you stoop down close and keep watching these thousands and thousands of communicants making their way in.

When the last bee had entered, I closed up the opening with a block, lifted the load on the wheelbarrow, and sent the farm boy struggling manfully homeward. This, I supposed, was the end of a pleasing summer-day incident. And so I turned my attention to the garden again.

In an hour or so, as the shadows were beginning to reach out in the direction of night, I gave over my work in the garden and went up the path past the corner of the house; and there on the plum tree, hanging from the selfsame limb and clinging partly to the trunk, as before, was that very swarm of bees again. For a swarm of bees to leave a furnished hive which they had voluntarily entered and come back to continue some allegiance to a particular limb of a tree was impossible. But there they were. It was like a magician’s trick — an object is put in a box and sealed securely, and then it defies all law and appears right under your nose.

While my jaw was still hanging open with astonishment, I perceived what had taken place. The bees that I sent away had been hanging on the tree several hours. These that I saw now were a part of the swarm that had separated one by one and gone afield for some reason. They were off foraging or house hunting. While they were thus absent I had hived the others and sent them away. And now the wanderers had returned as the sun declined; and here they were, looking just like the ones I had sent away. Calculating five thousand bees to the quart, there must have been fifteen thousand now on the tree.

Their whole adventure, so far, seemed to have been as follows. A swarm of bees had been led by their scouts to a bad location. The scouts must have found the place on some cooler day than this, when its combmelting qualities would not be evident. Finding it a mistake, they had settled on the little plum tree pending the choice of another location. Bees have got to stay together. They can do nothing alone, and any that wander away must come back to the rest of the swarm. And so this present detachment, having wandered away, had come back to join the rest; and in spite of the fact that the others had gone they settled and stayed here. They did this solely because it was headquarters. It was the bees’ home office or temporary address until they could find a permanent location and all depart together; and to come back to it was according to bee rules. Anyway, this was how I added up their moves and mishaps — correctly, so far as I know — while I stood there thinking them over.

And now I naturally wondered what these bees would do. Would they find a suitable home and move into it, or would they return to the old home from which they had migrated? On the following morning I should probably find them gone; and this would be all I should ever know of them.

But next morning they were still there. And on the morning following they were still there. To come to the point at once, they stayed on my tree permanently, coming and going individually, but hanging in a clump — or rather they stayed as permanently as bees can stay, considering the length of a bee’s life. They dwindled gradually as time passed; and finally the last bee of all lost his hold and fell off, or failed to come back at night. And this was on the first day of September. Altogether they were with me seven weeks — fifty days, to be exact; and in that time I had ample opportunity to look them over, show them to visitors, and note their conduct under the new conditions.

VI

Of course it did not take me longer than a day to discover the one great thing that had happened to them. The queen was gone. She was with the contingent I had sent away. And this part of the swarm, being queenless, would do nothing. More strictly stated, they could do nothing, for there was nothing for them to do. Bees, in all their multiform activities in the hive, are engaged in raising young. And with no queen laying eggs there are no young to hatch. Therefore, why should they waste their efforts in building cells, bringing home nectar and pollen, and doing all those things that we see done around a hive?

At this juncture in our narrative it might seem in order to enlarge upon the dolefulness of their plight. We might regard them as a dead swarm, a clump of naturally busy bees with all their instincts frustrated and no object left in life. Certainly they were there till the hand of death should claim them; and it would be easy to write in eloquent terms about the tragedy of a queenless swarm.

But it is better to stick to facts. Those bees lived longer than they would have lived had they found a home and kept on working as they do at the height of the season. They came and went from this hiveless and combless cluster and fared quite as well as they would have done in a hive. Bees live on the nectar which they sip from flowers, carrying the surplus home in their honey bags for the feeding of others; and these bees of mine were in no want. They did not starve to death. Rain fell on the cluster repeatedly, and several times the wind was high; but this did not seem to have any ill effect on them. They hung there in their rounded formation, and certainly the most of them remained dry in spite of any storm. Those on the outside could enter the cluster if they wished, while the wings of others would shingle the outer surface. And in fair weather they were free to go in search of flowers and live their natural life in the field.

When we think of bees in accordance with figures of speech we say that the bee lays up stores for itself in winter and thus shows foresight. But as the extreme length of a bee’s life in the working season is thirty-five days it is quite apparent that none of these busy workers of the flowery months ever live to enjoy a drop of the honey that is stored. They are working entirely for posterity. A bee in summer does not absolutely need a comb to cling to or cells to contain honey or pollen. Those cells are cradles and incubators for the young that are being raised, and they are sealed storage space for supplies that will serve to carry later generations over the winter. So far as the individual bees are concerned, any swarm could hang on a tree and do quite well. Certainly these bees of mine lived more than the usual life of the hard worker.

When I say that they dwindled till there were but a few that could be easily counted, and that these dwindled till there was but one living on the accustomed spot, I am speaking in exact terms. A few days before the end I went out to make my usual inspection toward evening and there were six bees surviving. But there they were at the usual headquarters, as much a swarm of bees as if there had been forty thousand of them. On the last day of August there was but one bee. It was spending the night on a place on the bark where a little wax had been deposited and a single cell built up to the height of about a sixteenth of an inch. And on the first of September that bee was not to be seen. The last one or two of the swarm had lived forty-nine to fifty days after the time when they arrived at my home.

During the time that I had this swarm on hand I found that people generally are much surprised to find that bees can subsist quite well apart from a comb and a sheltered hive and without doing any of the usual work of a bee. Many visitors were brought to see what I had done with a swarm of bees; and I was expected to explain the hows and whys of my seemingly domesticated colony. From considerable experience in delivering myself of bee philosophy I came to be of the opinion that a swarm in this condition would be the ideal object lesson for lecturing purposes. I do not know, however, how anyone could plan beforehand to intercept a swarm of bees in their flight from one home to another and then manage to rob them of their queen.

Bees in a clump hang loosely, so that those inside can come to the surface at will, and this they are always doing. Thus, while the clump keeps its entity, the individual bees are always flying abroad and returning and changing places with others. On a warm day there was always an aura of bees hovering about the surface as they came and went. The swarm was by no means dead or disheartened. They did not build comb, because that is a part of raising young, and in the absence of a queen there was no such work to do. As for their disposition to sting, I could put my face quite close to the cluster and watch them at leisure. Around a hive one is likely to be stung when he stands in the line of flight — that is, when he is interfering with the work. In such a clump as this the bees seemed to be quite tolerant of company.

A general point of view is that a bee stings in self-defense. But a bee usually dies as the result of the loss of its sting, and what sort of self-defense is it that so surely ends in death? Here again we see that bees live and die in the support and defense of the hive, and not of themselves. What a bee lives for would be hard to say, looking at the thing from an individual and selfish standpoint. Like the rest of animated nature, vegetable as well as animal, bees are engaged in the work of propagation. And they seem to be wholly and heartily taken up with the work.