CHAPTER VIII.

THE BEES AS ARCHITECTS: THE CITY.

If the wasp's nest resemble Sparta, the bee-hive is the veritable Athens of the Insect World. There, all is art. The people--the artist-élite of the people--incessantly create two things; on the one hand, the City, the country,--on the other, the Universal Mother, whose task it is not only to perpetuate the race, but to become its idol, its _fetish_, the living god of the community.

The bees share with the wasps, the ants, and all the sociable insects, the disinterested life of aunts and sisters,--laborious virgins, who devote themselves entirely to an adoptive maternity.

But from these analogous peoples the bee differs in the necessity it is under of creating a national idol, the love of which impels it to work.

All this has been long misunderstood. It was at first supposed that this State was a monarchy, _that it possessed a king_. Not at all; the king is a female. Thereupon one is driven to say, _This female is a queen_. Another error. Not only does she not govern, or reign, or control, but in certain conjunctions she is governed, and sometimes even placed in private confinement. She is at once something more and something less than a queen. She is an object of legal and public adoration; I should say legal and constitutional, for this adoration is not so blind but that the idol, in some cases, as we shall see, may be treated very severely.

"Then, at bottom, the government will be democratic?" Yes; if we take into consideration the unanimous devotion of the people, the spontaneous labour of everybody. No one commands. But, nevertheless, you can clearly see that in every higher work an intelligent body of the _élite_, an aristocracy of artists, takes the lead. The city is not built or organized by the entire people, but by a special class, a kind of guild or corporation. While the mob of bees seeks the common nourishment abroad, certain much larger bees, the wax-makers, elaborate the wax, prepare it, shape it, and skilfully make use of it. Like the medieval freemasons, this respectable corporation of architects toils and builds on the principles of a profound geometry. Like those of the old days, they are _the masters of the living stone_. But our worthy bees are far more deserving of the title! The materials which they employ they have made, have elaborated by their vital action, and vivified with their internal juices.

Neither the honey nor the wax is a vegetable substance. Those little light bees which go in quest of the essence of the flowers bring it back already transformed and enriched by their virginal life. Sweet and pure, it passes from their mouth to the mouth of their elder sisters. These, the grave wax-makers, having received the aliment vivified and endowed with the charming sweetness which is, as it were, the soul of the race, elaborate it in their turn, and communicate to it their own peculiar life,--solidity. Wise and sedentary, they work up the liquid into a sedentary honey, a honey of the second quality, a kind of reflected honey. This is not all: the substance twice elaborated, and twice penetrated with animal juice, they incessantly moisten with their saliva, when using it so as to render it softer for working, but more tenacious afterwards.

Was I wrong, then, in saying that this construction is truly one of "the living stones"? There is not an atom of the materials which is not three times impregnated with life. Who shall say of yonder hive whether the flower or the bee has furnished the greater part? The latter has certainly contributed an important share. Here, the home of the people is the people's substance and visible soul; from themselves they have extracted their city, and their city is, in truth, themselves. Bee and hive, it is one and the same thing.

But let us observe them at work.

Alone, in the centre of the still empty and to be created hive, the learned wax-maker advances. From beneath its wings it delicately extracts a thin slab of wax, and conveys it to its mouth, where it is well kneaded and pounded, and drawn out into the shape of a ribbon. Eight strips are in this wise furnished, wrought, and absorbed; and the result is eight little blocks, which the bee lays down as the first beams of the future edifice, the foundations of the new city.

Others continue the work without moving too far from the place where it was begun. If any unintelligent labourer does not follow the prescribed plan, the mistress-bees, experienced and accomplished, are on the spot to detect any error, and immediately remedy it.

In the solid mass, well placed and skilfully squared, where such numbers have harmoniously deposited their contribution of wax, an excavation must now be made, and some degree of form attained. A single bee again detaches herself from the crowd, and with her horny tongue, teeth, and paws, she contrives to hollow out the solid matter like a reversed vault. When fatigued she retires, and others take up the work of modelling. In couples they shape off and thin the walls. The only point to be remembered is a skilful management of their thickness. But how do they appreciate this? Who or what warns them the moment a stroke too much would break an opening in the partition? They never take the trouble to make a tour of their work and examine it from the other side. Their eyes are useless to them; they judge of everything by their antennæ, which are their plumb-line and compass. They feel about, and by an infinitely delicate touch recognize the elasticity of the wax, perhaps by the sound it renders, and determine whether it is safe to excavate it, or whether they must stop short, and not push their mining operations further.

The building, as everybody knows, is destined to serve two ends. The cells are generally used in summer as cradles, in winter as magazines of pollen and honey,--a granary of abundance for the republic. Each vessel is closed and sealed with a waxen lid, a _clôture_ religiously respected by all the people, who take for their subsistence only a single comb,--and when that comb is finished pass on to another, but always with extreme reserve and sobriety.

It has been said and repeated that the construction is absolutely uniform. Buffon goes so far as to pretend that the cell is but the identical form of the bee, which posts itself in the wax, and by the friction of its body, a blind manoeuvre, obtains an impress of itself, a hollow, an identical cell. A baseless hypothesis, which the least reflection would show to be improbable, even if observation did not contradict it.

In reality, their work is extremely various, and diversified in numerous different ways.

In the first place, the combs are pierced in the centre by corridors or little tunnels, which do away with the necessity of traversing two sides. Economists in everything, the bees are specially economical of time.

Secondly, the form of the cells is by no means identical. They prefer the hexagon,--the form which is best adapted to secure the greatest possible number of cells in the smallest area. But they do not slavishly bind themselves to this form. The first comb which they attach to the framework would cling to it very insecurely, and only by its projecting edges, if it were composed of six-sided cells. They therefore make it with five sides only; and fashion it of pentagonal cells with broad bases, which attach themselves solidly to the wood on a continuous line. The whole is agglutinated and sealed, not with wax, but with their gum, or _propolis_, which, as it dries, becomes hard as iron.

The great royal cellules, or cradles of the future mothers, which may be seen by the side of the combs, are not six-sided, but of the form of an oblong egg,--which secures the royal favourites considerable ease, and a great facility of development.

Finally, you may, with a little attention, detect important differences among the ordinary hexagonal cells, though at the first glance they all seem alike. They are small for the industrious gleaners, larger for the artistic wax-makers, and largest for the males. This size is generally obtained by means of a little rounded fragment which is deposited in the bottom, and renders it slightly circular,--I was about to say pot-bellied (_ventru_). As the house, so the tenant; the male will come into the world a squat, obese figure,--predestined to this form by that of its cradle.

Thus, of their own accord, they vary the configuration and extent of the cellules. And they vary them yet more, according to the obstacles they encounter. If room be denied them, they reduce the size of their hexagons in due proportion and with extreme address. This fact Huber verified by some ingenious experiments. He bethought himself of deranging their operations by placing, instead of wood, a plate of glass against the wall of the hive where they were building up their cells. From the distance they saw this smooth shining crystal, to which nothing could be fixed; and taking their measures accordingly, they curved their cake in such a manner that it went past the glass and joined on to the wood. But, to carry out the alteration, it became necessary to change the diameter of the cells; to enlarge that of the convex portion, and diminish that of the concave. A delicate problem! and yet it was readily solved by the skilful architects.

In mid-winter, says Huber again, in their season of inertia, an over-heavy slab of wax fell away, but was checked _en route_ by the cakes beneath. An avalanche seemed imminent! But the bees invented buttresses and barriers in strong mastic, which, supporting the fallen cake and propping up the sides of the hive, prevented the dangerous ruin from dragging down the inner edifice. Then, to prevent the occurrence of similar misfortunes, they created some novel architectural works in the shape of flying buttresses, bulwarks, pillars, cross-beams, and the like.

_Novel!_ Ay, this is a sufficient refutation of Buffon's theory. That machines or automata could invent, is a thing not easily explicable. Yet the sovereign authority of this great dictator of natural history would have prevailed, perhaps, over facts and over observation, if, towards the close of the last century, the bees themselves, by an unforeseen stroke, had not definitively cut the Gordian knot.

It was about the epoch of the American, and shortly before the outbreak of the French Revolution. An unknown creature then made its appearance over all Europe,--of a frightful figure,--a great strong nocturnal butterfly, marked very plainly in tawny-gray, with a hideous death's head. This sinister being, which none had seen before, alarmed every countryside, and seemed an omen of the most terrible misfortunes. Yet, in truth, those who were terrified by it had brought it into Europe. It had come in the grub condition with its natal plant, the American potato,--the fashionable vegetable which Parmentier extolled, Louis XVI. protected, and which spread in all directions. The savants baptized the insect with a somewhat horrifying name--the _Sphinx Atropos_.

And terrible indeed _was_ this new creature, but only for the honey. Of this it was remorselessly greedy, and to attain it was capable of everything. A hive of thirty thousand bees could not daunt it. In the depths of night, the rapacious monster, profiting by the hour when the approaches to the city are less carefully guarded, with a gloomy but subdued sound, as if stifled by the soft down which covers it (and all other nocturnal insects), invaded the hive, swooped down on the combs, devoured and plundered, gutted and destroyed the magazines, and slew the infant bees. In vain they awoke, and flew to arms; their sting could not penetrate through the soft elastic padding which clothed the sphinx,--like the cotton armour worn by the Mexicans in the days of Cortez, and impenetrable by Spanish weapons.

Huber meditated on the best means of protecting his bees against this shameless brigand. Should it be by gratings, or doors? And how? He could not determine. The most skilfully devised barriers have always the inconvenience of impeding the great movement of ingress and egress, which takes place at the threshold of the hive. Their impatience regarded as intolerable the obstructions, which could not fail to embarrass them, and against which they might break their wings.

One morning, Huber's faithful assistant, who seconded him in his experiments, brought information that the bees themselves had already solved the problem. In different hives they had conceived and attempted various systems of defence and fortification. Here they constructed a wall of wax, with narrow loopholes, through which the _great_ enemy could not pass. There, by a more ingenious expedient, without creating a single impediment, they built up some inter-crossing arcades at the gates, or tiny cloisters one behind the other, but running in different directions,--that is to say, to the void left by the first corresponded the substance of the second. Thus was secured a number of openings for the impatient buzzing crowd, which might go in and out as usual, with no other difficulty than that of moving in a slightly zigzag fashion. At the same time, a complete barrier was obtained against the great and _big_ enemy, which could no longer enter with expanded wings, nor even glide uninjured through the narrow corridors.

It was the _coup d'état_ of the brute creation, the revolution of the insects, executed by the bees, not only against their plunderers, but against the calumniators who had denied their intelligence. The theorists who had refused to believe in it, the Malebranches and the Buffons, were compelled to own themselves beaten. They had to adopt the reserve of eminent observers, like Swammerdam and Réaumur, who, far from questioning the genius of insects, furnish us with numerous facts in proof of its flexibility, of its rising to the measure of great dangers, of its scorn of routine, and of its power to make unexpected progress under certain circumstances.