“Queens?” said the Bee-Master of Warrilow, as he filled his pipe with the blackest and strongest tobacco I had ever set eyes on; “queens? There are hundreds of hives here, as you can see; and there isn’t a queen in any one of them.”
He drew at the pipe until he had it into full blast, and the smoke went drifting idly away through the still April sunshine. We were in the very midst of the bee-garden, sitting side by side on the honey-barrow after a long morning’s work among the hives; and the old bee-man had into his usual contemplative mood.
“’Tis a pretty idea,” he went on, “this of , and a realm of dutiful subjects, and all the rest of it, in bee-life. But experience in apiculture, as with most things of this world, does away with a good many fine and fanciful notions. Now, the mother-bee in a hive, whatever else you might call her, is certainly not a queen, in the sense of ruling over the other bees in the colony. The truth is she has little or nothing to do with the direction of affairs. All the thinking and is done by the worker-bees. They have the whole management of the hive, and simply look upon the queen as a much prized and carefully-guarded piece of egg-laying , to be made the most of as long as her usefulness lasts, but to be thrown over and replaced by another the moment her powers begin to flag.”
“No; there are no queens, properly so called, in bee-life,” he continued. “All that belongs to the good old times when there were nothing but straw-skeps, and ’twas well-nigh impossible to get at the rights of anything; so the bee-keeper went on believing that honey was made out of starshine, and young bees were bred from the juice of white honeysuckle, which was all pretty enough in its way, even though it warn’t true. But nowadays, when they make hives with comb-frames that can be lifted out and looked at in the broad light of day, folk are beginning to understand a power of things about bees that were dark mysteries only a while ago.”
He at his pipe for a little in silence. Far away over the great province of hives, the clock on the extracting-house to half-past twelve; and, true to their usual time, the home-staying bees—the and nurses and lately hatched young ones—were out for their midday exercise. The foragers were going to and fro as thickly as ever with their loads of and water for the still cradled larvæ within; but now round every hive a little cloud of bees , filling the sunshine with the music of their wings. The old bee-man took up his theme again presently at the point he had broken it off.
“If,” said he, “you keep a fairly close watch on the progress of any one particular hive, from the time the first eggs appear in the combs early in January, ’tis very easy to see how the old false ideas got into general use. At first glance a bee-colony looks very much like a kingdom; and the single large bee, that all the others pay court to and attend so carefully, seems very like a queen. Then, when you look a little deeper and begin to understand more, appearances are still all in favour of the old view of things. The mother-bee seems, on the face of it, a miracle of intelligence and . While, as far as you know, all other creatures in the world bring their young of both sexes , this one can lay male or female eggs at will. You watch her going from comb to comb, and the eggs she drops in the small cells hatch out females, and those she puts in the larger ones are always males, or drones. More than that: she seems always to know the exact condition of the hive, and to be able to limit her egg-laying according to its need, or otherwise, of population; for either you see her filling only a few cells each day in a little patch of comb that can be covered with the palm of your hand, or she goes to work on a gigantic scale, and, in twenty-four hours, produces eggs that weigh more than twice as much as her whole body.”
He got up now and began pacing to and fro, as was his custom when much in earnest over his bee-talk.
“Then,” he went on, “to cap all, as the honey season draws on to its height, you are forced presently to realise that the queen has conceived and is carrying through a scheme for the good of her subjects that would do credit to the wisest ruler ever born in human purple. Every day of summer sunshine has brought thousands of young bees to life. The hive is getting overcrowded. Sooner or later one of two things must happen—either the increase of population must be checked, or a great party must be formed to leave the old home and go out to establish another one. Then it is that the mother-bee seems to prove beyond a doubt her wisdom and queenliness. She decides for the emigration; but as a leader must be found for the party, and none is at hand, she forms the resolve to head it herself. From that moment a change c............