The Queen
Appropriately styled, by German bee-keepers, the mother-bee, is the only perfectly developed female among the whole population of each separate colony. Thus her majesty indisputably sways her sceptre by a divine right, because she lives and reigns in the hearts of loving children and subjects.
Dr. Evans2 introduces the queen-bee to our notice thus:—
“First of the throng, and foremost of the whole.
One ‘stands confest the sovereign and the soul.’”
The queen may very readily be distinguished from the rest of the bees by the greater length of her body and the comparative shortness of her wings; her legs are longer, and are not furnished with either brushes or baskets as those of the working bee, for, being constantly fed by the latter, she does not need those implements; the upper surface of her body is of a brighter black than the other bees, whilst her colour underneath is a yellowish brown;3 her wings, which do not extend more than half the length of her body, are sinewy and strong; her long abdomen tapers nearly to a point; her head is rounder, her tongue more slender, and not nearly so long, as that of the working bee, and her sting is curved. Her movements are measured and majestic; as she moves in the hive the other bees form a circle round her, none venturing to turn their backs upon her, but all anxious to show that respect and attention due to her rank and station. Whenever, in the exercise of her sovereign will, the queen wishes to travel amongst her subjects, she experiences no inconvenience from overcrowding; although the part of the hive to which she is journeying may be the most populous, way is immediately made, the common bees tumbling over each other to get out of her path, so great is their anxiety not to interfere with the royal progress.
It is the chief function of the queen to lay the eggs from which all future bees originate, the multiplication of the species being the purpose of her existence; and she follows it up with an assiduity similar to that with which the workers construct combs or collect honey. A queen is estimated to lay in the breeding season from 1,500 to 2,000 eggs a-day, and in the course of one year is supposed to produce more than 100,000 bees. This is indeed a vast number; but when there is taken into consideration the great number required for swarms, the constant lessening of their strength by death in various ways, and the many casualties attending them in their distant travels in search of the luscious store, it does not seem that the case is over-stated.
In a Glass Unicomb Hive,—which we shall hereinafter describe,—all the movements of the queen-bee may be traced; she may be seen thrusting her head into a cell to discover whether it be occupied with an egg or honey, and if empty, she turns round in a dignified manner and inserts her long body—so long, that she is able to deposit the egg at the bottom of the cell; she then passes on to another, and so continues industriously multiplying her laborious subjects. It not unfrequently happens when the queen is prolific, and if it be an early season, that many eggs are wasted for want of unoccupied cells; for in that case the queen leaves them exposed at the bottom of the hive, when they are greedily devoured by the bees.
The queen-bee, unlike the great majority of her subjects, is a stayer at home; generally speaking, she only quits the hive twice in her life.. The first occasion is on the all-important day of her marriage, which always takes place at a great height in the air, and generally on the second or third day of her princess-life; she never afterwards leaves the hive, except to lead off an emigrating swarm. Evans, with proper loyalty, has duly furnished a glowing epithalamium for the queen-bee thus:—
“When noon-tide Sirius glares on high,
Young love ascends the glowing sky,
From vein to vein swift shoots prolific fire,
And thrills each insect fibre with desire;
Then Nature, to fulfil thy prime decree,
Wheels round, in wanton rings, the courtier Bee;
Now shyly distant, now with bolder air,
He woos and wins the all-complying fair;
Through fields of ether, veiled in vap’ry gloom
They seek, with amorous haste, the nuptial room;
As erst the immortal pair, on Ida’s height,
Wreath’d round their noon of joy ambrosial night.”
The loyalty and attachment of bees to their queen is one of their most remarkable characteristics; they constantly supply her with food, and fawn upon and caress her, softly touching her with their antennæ—a favour which she occasionally returns. When she moves about the hive, all the bees through whom she successively passes pay her the same homage; those whom she leaves behind in her track close together, and resume their accustomed occupations.
The majestic deportment of the queen-bee and the homage paid to her is, with a little poetic licence, thus described by Evans:—
“But mark, of royal port and awful mien,
Where moves with measured pace the insect Queen!
Twelve chosen guards, with slow and solemn gait,
Bend at her nod, and round her person wait.”
This homage is, however, only paid to matron queens. Whilst they continue princesses, they receive no distinctive marks of respect. Dr. Dunbar, the noted Scotch apiarian, observed a very striking instance of this whilst experimenting on the combative qualities of the queen-bee “So long,” says he, “as the queen which survived the rencontre with her rival remained a virgin, not the slightest degree of respect or attention was paid her; not a single bee gave her food; she was obliged, as often as she required it, to help herself; and in crossing the honey cells for that purpose, she had to scramble, often with difficulty, over the crowd, not an individual of which got out of her way, or seemed to care whether she fed or starved: but no sooner did she become a mother, than the scene was changed, and all testified towards her that most affectionate attention, which is uniformly exhibited to fertile queens.”
The queen-bee, though provided with a sting, never uses it on any account, except in combat with her sister-queens. But she admits of no rival to her throne; almost her first act, on coming forth from the cell, is an attempt to tear open and destroy the cells containing the pupæ of princesses likely to become competitors. Should it so happen that another queen of similar age does exist in the hive at the same time, the two are speedily brought into contact with each other, in order to fight it out and decide by a struggle, mortal to one of them, which is to be the ruler;—the stronger of course is victorious, and remains supreme. This, it must be admitted, is a wiser method of settling the affair than it would be to range the whole hive under two distinct banners, and so create a civil war, in which the members of the rival bands would kill and destroy each other for matters they individually have little or no concern about: for the bees care not which queen it is, so long as they are certain of having one to rule over them and perpetuate the community.
After perusing the description given above of the attachment of bees to their queen, it may be easy to imagine the consternation a hive is thrown into when deprived of her presence. The bees first make a diligent search for their monarch in the hive, and then afterwards rush forth in immense numbers to seek her. When such a commotion is observed in an apiary, the experienced bee-master will repair the loss by giving a queen: the bees have generally their own remedy for such a calamity, in their power of raising a new queen from amongst their larvæ; but if neither of these means be available, the whole colony dwindles and dies. The following is the method by which working bees provide a successor to the throne when deprived of their queen by accident, or in anticipation of the first swarm, which is always led by the old queen:—
They select, when not more than three days old, an egg or grub previously intended for a worker-bee, and then enlarge the cell so selected by destroying the surrounding partitions; they thus form a royal cradle, in shape very much like an acorn cup inverted. The chosen embryo is then fed liberally with a peculiar description of nurture, called by naturalists “royal jelly”—a pungent food, prepared by the working bees exclusively for those of the larvae that are destined to become candidates for the honour of royalty. Should a queen be forcibly separated from her subjects, she resents the interference, refuses food, pines, and dies.
The whole natural history of the queen-bee is in itself a subject that will well repay for continuous study. Those who desire to follow it, we would refer to the complete works of Huber—the greatest of apiarians,—Swammerdam, Bevan, Langstroth, &c. The observations upon the queen-bee needful to verify the above-mentioned facts can only be made in hives constructed for the purpose, of which the “Unicomb Observatory Hive” is the best. In ordinary hives the queen is scarcely ever to be seen; where there are several rows of comb, she invariably keeps between them, both for warmth and to be more secure from danger. The writer has frequently observed in stocks which have unfortunately died, that the queen was one of the last to expire; and she is always more difficult to gain possession of than other bees, being by instinct taught that she is indispensable to the welfare of her subjects.
The queen enjoys a far longer life than any of her subjects, her age generally extending to four, or even five years. The drones, which are mostly hatched in the early spring, seldom live more than three or four months, even if they should escape the sting of the executioner, to which they generally fall victims. The worker-bee, it is now a well-ascertained fact, lives from six to eight months, in no case exceeding the latter; so that we may reckon that the bees hatched in April and May expire about the end of the year; and it is those of the autumn who carry on the duties of the hive until the spring and summer, that being the time when the greatest number of eggs are laid. The population of a hive is very small during the winter, in comparison with the vast numbers gathering produce in the summer,—produce which they themselves live to enjoy but for a short period. So that not only, as of old, may lessons of industry be learned from bees, but they also teach self-denial to mankind, since they labour for the community rather than for themselves. Evans, in describing the age of bees, thus paraphrases the well known couplet of Homer, in allusion to the fleeting generations of men:—
“Like leaves on trees the race of bees is found.
Now green in youth, now withering on the ground;
Another race the spring or fall supplies,
They droop successive, and successive rise.”
Notes
2 Dr. Evans—who may be styled the poet-laureate of the bees—lived at Shrewsbury, where he practised as a physician. His poem on bees is written with great taste and careful elaboration, and it describes the habits of bees with a degree of accuracy only attainable after continuous scientific observation.
3 Yellow Italian queens form an exception in point of colour. See frontispiece, fig. I.