Chapter 14

The bees do not, like ourselves, dwell in towns free to the sky, and exposed to the caprice of rain and storm, but in cities entirely covered with a protecting envelope. In a state of nature, however, in an ideal climate, this is not the case. If they listened only to their essential instinct, they would construct their combs in the open air. In the Indies, the Apis Dorsata will not eagerly seek hollow trees, or a hole in the rocks. The swarm will hang from the crook of a branch; and the comb will be lengthened, the queen lay her eggs, provisions be stored, with no shelter other than that which the workers' own bodies provide. Our Northern bees have at times been known to revert to this instinct, under the deceptive influence of a too gentle sky; and swarms have been found living in the heart of a bush. But even in the Indies, the result of this habit, which would seem innate, is by no means favourable. So considerable a number of the workers are compelled to remain on one spot, occupied solely with the maintenance of the heat required by those who are moulding the wax and rearing the brood, that the Apis Dorsata, hanging thus from the branches, will construct but a single comb; whereas if she have the least shelter she will erect four or five, or more, and will proportionately increase the prosperity and the population of the colony. And indeed we find that all species of bees existing in cold and temperate regions have abandoned this primitive method. The intelligent initiative of the insect has evidently received the sanction of natural selection, which has allowed only the most numerous and best protected tribes to survive our winters. What had been merely an idea, therefore, and opposed to instinct, has thus by slow degrees become an instinctive habit. But it is none the less true that in forsaking the vast light of nature that was so dear to them and seeking shelter in the obscure hollow of a tree or a cavern, the bees have followed what at first was an audacious idea, based on observation, probably, on experience and reasoning. And this idea might be almost declared to have been as important to the destinies of the domestic bee as was the invention of fire to the destinies of man.

{101}

This great progress, not the less actual for being hereditary and ancient, was followed by an infinite variety of details which prove that the industry, and even the policy, of the hive have not crystallised into infrangible formulae. We have already mentioned the intelligent substitution of flour for pollen, and of an artificial cement for propolis. We have seen with what skill the bees are able to adapt to their needs the occasionally disconcerting dwellings into which they are introduced, and the surprising adroitness wherewith they turn combs of foundation-wax to good account. They display extraordinary ingenuity in their manner of handling these marvellous combs, which are so strangely useful, and yet incomplete. In point of fact, they meet man half-way. Let us imagine that we had for centuries past been erecting cities, not with stones, bricks, and lime, but with some pliable substance painfully secreted by special organs of our body. One day an all-powerful being places us in the midst of a fabulous city. We recognise that it is made of a substance similar to the one that we secrete, but, as regards the rest, it is a dream, whereof what is logical is so distorted, so reduced, and as it were concentrated, as to be more disconcerting almost than had it been incoherent. Our habitual plan is there; in fact, we find everything that we had expected; but all has been put together by some antecedent force that would seem to have crushed it, arrested it in the mould, and to have hindered its completion. The houses whose height must attain some four or five yards are the merest protuberances, that our two hands can cover. Thousands of walls are indicated by signs that hint at once of their plan and material. Elsewhere there are marked deviations, which must be corrected; gaps to be filled and harmoniously joined to the rest, vast surfaces that are unstable and will need support. The enterprise is hopeful, but full of hardship and danger. It would seem to have been conceived by some sovereign intelligence, that was able to divine most of our desires, but has executed them clumsily, being hampered by its very vastness. We must disentangle, therefore, what now is obscure, we must develop the least intentions of the supernatural donor; we must build in a few days what would ordinarily take us years; we must renounce organic habits, and fundamentally alter our methods of labour. It is certain that all the attention man could devote would not be excessive for the solution of the problems that would arise, or for the turning to fullest account the help thus offered by a magnificent providence. Yet that is, more or less, what the bees are doing in our modern hives.*

*As we are now concerned with the construction of the bee, we may note, in passing, a strange peculiarity of the Apis Florea. Certain walls of its cells for males are cylindrical instead of hexagonal. Apparently she has not yet succeeded in passing from one form to the other, and indefinitely adopting the better.

{102}

I have said that even the policy of the bees is probably subject to change. This point is the obscurest of all, and the most difficult to verify. I shall not dwell on their various methods of treating the queens, or the laws as to swarming that are peculiar to the inhabitants of every hive, and apparently transmitted from generation to generation, etc.; but by the side of these facts which are not sufficiently established are others so precise and unvarying as to prove that the same degree of political civilisation has not been attained by all races of the domestic bee, and that, among some of them, the public spirit still is groping its way, seeking perhaps another solution of the royal problem. The Syrian bee, for instance, habitually rears 120 queens and often more, whereas our Apis Mellifica will rear ten or twelve at most. Cheshire tells of a Syrian hive, in no way abnormal, where 120 dead queen-mothers were found, and 90 living, unmolested queens. This may be the point of departure, or the point of arrival, of a strange social evolution, which it would be interesting to study more thoroughly. We may add that as far as the rearing of queens is concerned, the Cyprian bee approximates to the Syrian. And finally, there is yet another fact which establishes still more clearly that the customs and prudent organisation of the hive are not the results of a primitive impulse, mechanically followed through different ages and climates, but that the spirit which governs the little republic is fully as capable of taking note of new conditions and turning these to the best advantage, as in times long past it was capable of meeting the dangers that hemmed it around. Transport our black bee to California or Australia, and her habits will completely alter. Finding that summer is perpetual and flowers forever abundant, she will after one or two years be content to live from day to day, and gather sufficient honey and pollen for the day's consumption; and, her thoughtful observation of these new features triumphing over hereditary experience, she will cease to make provision for the winter.* In fact it becomes necessary, in order to stimulate her activity, to deprive her systematically of the fruits of her labour.

*Buchner cites an analogous fact. In the Barbadoes, the bees whose hives are in the midst of the refineries, where they find sugar in abundance during the whole year, will entirely abandon their visits to the flowers.

{103}

So much for what our own eyes can see. It will be admitted that we have mentioned some curious facts, which by no means support the theory that every intelligence is arrested, every future clearly defined, save only the intelligence and future of man.

But if we choose to accept for one moment the hypothesis of evolution, the spectacle widens, and its uncertain, grandiose light soon attains our own destinies. Whoever brings careful attention to bear will scarcely deny, even though it be not evident, the presence in nature of a will that tends to raise a portion of matter to a subtler and perhaps better condition, and to penetrate its substance little by little with a mystery-laden fluid that we at first term life, then instinct, and finally intelligence; a will that, for an end we know not, organises, strengthens, and facilitates the existence of all that is. There can be no certainty, and yet many instances invite us to believe that, were an actual estimate possible, the quantity of matter that has raised itself from its beginnings would be found to be ever increasing. A fragile remark, I admit, but the only one we can make on the hidden force that leads us; and it stands for much in a world where confidence in life, until certitude to the contrary reach us, must remain the first of all our duties, at times even when life itself conveys no encouraging clearness to us.

I know all that may be urged against the theory of evolution. In its favour are numerous proofs and most powerful arguments, which yet do not carry irresistible conviction. We must beware of abandoning ourselves unreservedly to the prevailing truths of our time. A hundred years hence, many chapters of a book instinct to-day with this truth, will appear as ancient as the philosophical writings of the eighteenth century seem to us now, full as they are of a too perfect and non-existing man, or as so many works of the seventeenth century, whose value is lessened by their conception of a harsh and narrow god.

Nevertheless, when it is impossible to know what the truth of a thing may be, it is well to accept the hypothesis that appeals the most urgently to the reason of men at the period when we happen to have come into the world. The chances are that it will be false; but so long as we believe it to be true it will serve a useful purpose by restoring our courage and stimulating research in a new direction. It might at the first glance seem wiser, perhaps, instead of advancing these ingenious suppositions, simply to say the profound truth, which is that we do not know. But this truth could only be helpful were it written that we never shall know. In the meanwhile it would induce a state of stagnation within us more pernicious than the most vexatious illusions. We are so constituted that nothing takes us further or leads us higher than the leaps made by our errors. In point of fact we owe the little we have learned to hypotheses that were always hazardous and often absurd, and, as a general rule, less discreet than they are to-day. They were unwise, perhaps, but they kept alive the ardour for research. To the traveller, shivering with cold, who reaches the human Hostelry, it matters little whether he by whose side he seats himself, he who has guarded the hearth, be blind or very old. So long as the fire still burn that he has been watching, he has done as much as the best could have done. Well for us if we can transmit this ardour, not as we received it, but added to by ourselves; and nothing will add to it more than this hypothesis of evolution, which goads us to question with an ever severer method and ever increasing zeal all that exists on the earth's surface and in its entrails, in the depths of the sea and expanse of the sky. Reject it, and what can we set up against it, what can we put in its place? There is but the grand confession of scientific ignorance, aware of its knowing nothing--but this is habitually sluggish, and calculated to discourage the curiosity more needful to man than wisdom--or the hypothesis of the fixity of the species and of divine creation, which is less demonstrable than the other, banishes for all time the living elements of the problem, and explains nothing.

{104}

Of wild bees approximately 4500 varieties are known. It need scarcely be said that we shall not go through the list. Some day, perhaps, a profound study, and searching experiments and observations of a kind hitherto unknown, that would demand more than one lifetime, will throw a decisive light upon the history of the bee's evolution. All that we can do now is to enter this veiled region of supposition, and, discarding all positive statement, attempt to follow a tribe of hymenoptera in their progress towards a more intelligent existence, towards a little more security and comfort, lightly indicating the salient features of this ascension that is spread over many thousands of years. The tribe in question is already known to us; it is that of the "Apiens," whose essential characteristics are so distinct and well-marked that one is inclined to credit all its members with one common ancestor.*

*It is important that the terms we shall successively employ, adopting the classification of M. Emile Blanchard,-- "APIENS, APIDAE and APITAE,--should not be confounded. The tribe of the Apiens comprises all families of bees. The Apidae constitute the first of these families, and are subdivided into three groups: the Meliponae, the Apitae, and the Bombi (humble-bees). And, finally, the Apitae include all the different varieties of our domestic bees.

The disciples of Darwin, Hermann Muller among others, consider a little wild bee, the Prosopis, which is to be found all over the universe, as the actual representative of the primitive bee whence all have issued that are known to us to-day.

The unfortunate Prosopis stands more or less in the same relation to the inhabitants of our hives as the cave-dwellers to the fortunate who live in our great cities. You will probably more than once have seen her fluttering about the bushes, in a deserted corner of your garden, without realising that you were carelessly watching the venerable ancestor to whom we probably owe most of our flowers and fruits (for it is actually estimated that more than a hundred thousand varieties of plants would disappear if the bees did not visit them) and possibly even our civilisation, for in these mysteries all things intertwine. She is nimble and attractive, the variety most common in France being elegantly marked with white on a black background. But this elegance hides an inconceivable poverty. She leads a life of starvation. She is almost naked, whereas her sisters are dad in a warm and sumptuous fleece. She has not, like the Apidae, baskets to gather the pollen, nor, in their default, the tuft of the Andrenae, nor the ventral brush of the Gastrilegidae. Her tiny claws must laboriously gather the powder from the calices, which powder she needs must swallow in order to take it back to her lair. She has no implements other than her tongue, her mouth and her claws; but her tongue is too short, her legs are feeble, and her mandibles without strength. Unable to produce wax, bore holes through wood, or dig in the earth, she contrives clumsy galleries in the tender pith of dry berries; erects a few awkward cells, stores these with a little food for the offspring she never will see; and then, having accomplished this poor task of hers, that tends she knows not whither and of whose aim we are no less ignorant, she goes off and dies in a corner, as solitarily as she had lived.

We shall pass over many intermediary species, wherein we may see the gradual lengthening of the tongue, enabling more nectar to be extracted from the cups of corollas, and the dawning formation and subsequent development of the apparatus for collecting pollen,--hairs, tufts, brushes on the tibia, on the tarsus, and abdomen,--as also claws and mandibles becoming stronger, useful secretions being formed, and the genius that presides over the construction of dwellings seeking and finding extraordinary improvement in every direction. Such a study would need a whole volume. I will merely outline a chapter of it, less than a chapter, a page, which shall show how the hesitating endeavours of the will to live and be happier result in the birth, development, and affirmation of social intelligence.

We have seen the unfortunate Prosopis silently bearing her solitary little destiny in the midst of this vast universe charged with terrible forces. A certain number of her sisters, belonging to species already more skilful and better supplied with utensils, such as the well-clad Colletes, or the marvellous cutter of rose-leaves, the Megachile Centuncularis, live in an isolation no less profound; and if by chance some creature attach itself to them, and share their dwelling, it will either be an enemy, or, more often, a parasite.

For the world of bees is peopled with phantoms stranger than our own; and many a species will thus have a kind of mysterious and inactive double, exactly similar to the victim it has selected, save only that its immemorial idleness has caused it to lose one by one its implements of labour, and that it exists solely at the expense of the working type of its race.*

*The humble-bees, for instance, have the Psithyri as parasites, while the Stelites live on the Anthidia. "As regards the frequent identity of the parasite with its victim," M. J. Perez very justly remarks in his book "The Bees," "one must necessarily admit that the two genera are only different forms of the same type, and are united to each other by the closest affinity. And to naturalists who believe in the theory of evolution this relationship is not purely ideal, but real. The parasitic genus must be regarded as merely a branch of the foraging genus, having lost its foraging organs because of its adaptation to parasitic life."

Among the bees, however, which are somewhat too arbitrarily termed the "solitary Apidae," the social instinct already is smouldering, like a flame crushed beneath the overwhelming weight of matter that stifles all primitive life. And here and there, in unexpected directions, as though reconnoitring, with timid and sometimes fantastic outbursts, it will succeed in piercing the mass that oppresses it, the pyre that some day shall feed its triumph.

If in this world all things be matter, this is surely its most immaterial movement. Transition is called for from a precarious, egotistic and incomplete life to a life that shall be fraternal, a little more certain, a little more happy. The spirit must ideally unite that which in the body is actually separate; the individual must sacrifice himself for the race, and substitute for visible things the things that cannot be seen. Need we wonder that the bees do not at the first glance realise what we have not yet disentangled, we who find ourselves at the privileged spot whence instinct radiates from all sides into our consciousness? And it is curious too, almost touching, to see how the new idea gropes its way, at first, in the darkness that enfolds all things that come to life on this earth. It emerges from matter, it is still quite material. It is cold, hunger, fear, transformed into something that as yet has no shape. It crawls vaguely around great dangers, around the long nights, the approach of winter, of an equivocal sleep which almost is death....

{106}

The Xylocopae are powerful bees which worm their nest in dry wood. Their life is solitary always. Towards the end of summer, however, some individuals of a particular species, the Xylocopa Cyanescens, may be found huddled together in a shivering group, on a stalk of asphodel, to spend the winter in common. Among the Xylocopae this tardy fraternity is exceptional, but among the Ceratinae, which are of their nearest kindred, it has become a constant habit. The idea is germinating. It halts immediately; and hitherto has not succeeded, among the Xylocopae, in passing beyond this first obscure line of love.

Among other Apiens, this groping idea assumes other forms. The Chalicodomae of the out-houses, which are building-bees, the Dasypodae and Halicti, which dig holes in the earth, unite in large colonies to construct their nests. But it is an illusory crowd composed of solitary units, that possess no mutual understanding, and do not act in common. Each one is profoundly isolated in the midst of the multitude, and builds a dwelling for itself alone, heedless of its neighbour. "They are," M. Perez remarks, "a mere congregation of individuals, brought together by similar tastes and habits, but observing scrupulously the maxim of each one for itself; in fact, a mere mob of workers, resembling the swarm of a hive only as regards their number and zeal. Such assemblies merely result from a great number of individuals inhabiting the same locality."

But when we come to the Panurgi, which are cousins of the Dasypodae, a little ray of light suddenly reveals the birth of a new sentiment in this fortuitous crowd. They collect in the same way as the others, and each one digs its own subterranean chambers; but the entrance is common to all, as also the gallery which leads from the surface of the ground to the different cells. "And thus," M. Perez adds, "as far as the work of the cells is concerned, each bee acts as though she were alone; but all make equal use of the gallery that conducts to the cells, so that the multitude profit by the labours of an individual, and are spared the time and trouble required for the construction of separate galleries. It would be interesting to discover whether this preliminary work be not executed in common, by relays of females, relieving each other in turn."

However this may be, the fraternal idea has pierced the wall that divided two worlds. It is no longer wild and unrecognisable, wrested from instinct by cold and hunger, or by the fear of death; it is prompted by active life. But it halts once more; and in this instance arrives no further. No matter, it does not lose courage; it will seek other channels. It enters the humble-bee, and, maturing there, becomes embodied in a different atmosphere, and works its first decisive miracles.

The humble-bees, the great hairy, noisy creatures that all of us know so well, so harmless for all their apparent fierceness, lead a solitary life at first. At the beginning of March the impregnated female who has survived the winter starts to construct her nest, either underground or in a bush, according to the species to which she belongs. She is alone in the world, in the midst of awakening spring. She chooses a spot, clears it, digs it and carpets it. Then she erects her somewhat shapeless waxen cells, stores these with honey and pollen, lays and hatches the eggs, tends and nourishes the larvae that spring to life, and soon is surrounded by a troop of daughters who aid her in all her labours, within the nest and without, while some of them soon begin to lay in their turn. The construction of the cells improves; the colony grows, the comfort increases. The foundress is still its soul, its principal mother, and finds herself now at the head of a kingdom which might be the model of that of our honeybee. But the model is still in the rough.