Insect Stories Part 10

And now I am going to disappoint you dreadfully. But much less than Mary and I were disappointed. We were not there when the time came!

The bees were excited, I have said. Mary and I were excited, I have said. The bees put in _all_ their time being excited and watching the queen cell. We put in _most_ of ours. But we had to eat and we had to sleep. The bees didn't seem to. And so we missed the coming out. What a pity! How unfair to us! And to you.

As there is by immemorial honey-bee tradition but one queen in a community at one time, when new queens issue from the great cells, something has to happen. This may be one of three things: either the old and new queens battle to death, and it is believed that in such battles only does a queen bee ever use her sting, or the workers interfere and kill either the old or new queen by "balling" her (gathering in a tight suffocating ma.s.s about her), or either the old (usually old) or new queen leaves the hive with a swarm, and a new community is founded. In Fuzzy's community this last thing happened when the new queen came out.

Mary and I were on hand very early the morning of the third day after the piping and trumpeting had begun. As we jerked the black cloth jacket off the hive to see how things were, we were astonished at the new excitement that was apparent in the hive; the bees seemed to be in a perfect frenzy and had suspended all other operations except racing about in apparent utter dementia. We could find neither the old queen nor the new queen in the seething ma.s.s, nor could we even see whether the queen cell was open or still sealed up.

Another curious thing was that the taking off of the black cloth jacket seemed to affect the bees very strongly. They had suddenly become very sensitive to light, and while, when the jacket was on, they all seemed to be making towards the bottom and especially towards the exit corner, which was the lower corner next to the window, as soon as we lifted off the jacket they seemed all to rush up to the top where the light was strongest. So nearly simultaneous and uniform were the turning and rushing up that the whole ma.s.s of bees seemed to flow like some thick mottled liquid.

It was evident that all this was the excitement and frenzy of swarming. And it was also evident that the bees, in their great excitement, were finding their way to the outlet by the light that came in through it. And when we removed the cloth jacket we confused them because the light now came into the hive from both sides and was especially strong at the top, which was nearest the greatest expanse of the outer window. So we finally let the jacket stay on, and after a considerable time of violent exertion, the bees began to issue pell-mell from the door of the house. The first comers waited for the others, and there was pretty soon formed a great ma.s.s of excited bees around the doorway, and cl.u.s.tered on the stone window-sill just outside. Then suddenly the whole ma.s.s took wing and flew away together. And pretty soon all was quiet in the hive.

Mary and I had been nearly as excited as the bees, and we were glad to sit and rest a little and get breath again. Soon it was luncheon time and we went off to Mary's house without looking into the hive. We had had just about all the bee observing we needed for one forenoon. But almost the first thing that Mary did at the table was to straighten up suddenly and cry out, "I wonder if Fuzzy swarmed!" And thereafter that was all we thought of, and we made a very hasty meal of it. And the moment we got up we hurried back to Fuzzy's home and jerked off the black jacket.

How quiet everything was inside. And how lessened the number of bees.

Fully one-third of the community must have gone out. We set to work looking carefully at all the remaining bees. It was only a minute or two before Mary clapped her hands and cried, "She's here!" "She" was Fuzzy, of course. And we were both very glad that Fuzzy had not deserted the gla.s.s house--and us.

Some one came in and said that a "lot of your bees are out here hanging on to a bush." But we had seen "swarms" before, and were much more interested in finding out what the bees do inside after a swarm has gone off than in watching the swarm outside. We knew that "scouts"

would fly away soon from the great hanging bunch or swarm to look for a suitable new home; a hollow tree, a deserted hive, a box in hedge corner, any place protected and dark, and when they had found one, they would come back, and soon the whole swarm would fly off to the new house. Once one of our swarms started down a chimney of a neighbor's house, and immensely surprised the good people by coming out, with a great buzzing, into the fireplace! And another swarm, not finding a suitable indoors place, simply began to build new combs hanging down from the branch of a cypress-tree in the Arboretum, and really made an outdoor home there, carrying on all the work of a bee-community for months. But usually a bee-swarm gets found by some bee-keeper and put into an empty hive. And that is what happened to our deserters.

After Mary had found Fuzzy, who seemed to have lost considerable hair and to have got pretty well rubbed in the grand melee, she continued to peer carefully through the gla.s.s side of the hive. And I looked carefully too. Of course we wanted to find out about the queens. Was there any queen left in our hive? We knew there must be a queen with the swarm; bees don't go off without a queen. So if the old and new queen had fought and one had been killed, or if the workers had "balled" the new queen when she came out, there could be no queen left in the hive. Of course this would not be very serious. For there were many eggs and also many just-hatched bee-grubs in the brood-combs, and the workers could easily make a new queen. But this wasn't necessary, for we soon found a graceful, slender-bodied bee, but so fresh and brightly colored and clean that we knew her to be the new queen and not the old.

Things were perfectly normal and quiet. Some foragers were coming and going; house-cleaners were busily at work on the floor of the house, and nurses were moving about over the brood-cells. Not a trace of the wild frenzy of the forenoon. What a puzzling thing it is to see all the signs of tremendous mental excitement in other animals and yet not to be able to understand in the least their real condition! They may seem to do things for reasons and impulses that lead us to do things, but we can't be at all sure that their mental or nervous processes, their impulses and stimuli, are those which control us. We can't possibly put ourselves in their places. For we are made differently.

And therefore it is plainly foolish to try to interpret the behavior of the lower animals on a basis of our understanding of our own behavior. Insects may see colors we cannot see; may hear sounds we cannot hear; smell odors too delicate for us to smell. In fact, from our observations and experiments, we are sure they do all these things. The world to them, then, is different from the world to us.

And their behavior is based on their appreciation by their senses in their own way of this different world.

What determines which queen shall leave the hive with the swarm? What determines which five thousand out of fifteen thousand worker bees, all apparently similarly stimulated and excited, shall swarm out, and which ten thousand shall stay in? These are questions too hard for us to answer. We may take refuge in Maeterlinck's poetical conception of the "spirit of the hive." Let us say that the "spirit of the hive"

decides these things. As well as what workers shall forage and what ones clean house; what bees shall ventilate and what make wax and build comb. Which is simply to say that we don't know what decides all these things.

The reduction in numbers of the inmates of Fuzzy's house made it much easier to follow closely the behavior of any one bee, or any special group of bees doing some one thing. And both Mary and I had long wanted to see as clearly as possible just what goes on when the bees are making wax and building comb. We had often examined, on the bodies of dead bees, the four pairs of five-sided wax-plates on the under side of the hind body. We knew that the wax comes out of skin-glands under these plates as a liquid, and oozes through the pores of the plates, spreading out and hardening in thin sheets on the outside of the plates. To produce the wax certain workers eat a large amount of honey, and then ma.s.s together in a curtain or festoon hanging down from the ceiling of the hive or frame. Here they increase the temperature of their bodies by some strong internal exertion; and after several hours or sometimes two or three days, the fine glistening wax-sheets appear on the wax-plates. These sheets get larger and larger until they project beyond the edges of the body, when they either fall off or are plucked off by other workers.

It was only two or three days after the excitement of the swarming out that Mary and I saw one of these curtains or hanging festoons of bees making wax, and you may be sure we tried to watch it closely. The bees hung to each other by their legs and kept quite still. The curtain hung down fully six inches from the ceiling of the house, and the first or upper row of bees had therefore to sustain the hanging weight of all those below. And there were certainly several hundred bees in the curtain. The wax-scales began to appear on the second day. And many of them fell off and down to the floor of the house. Some of the scales were plucked off by other workers and carried in their mouths to where a new comb had been started before the swarming, and either used by themselves to help in the comb-building or given to comb-builders already at work. Some of the scales were plucked off by the wax-making workers themselves, who then left the curtain and carried the wax-scales to the seat of the comb-building operations.

Various other workers picked up from the floor the fallen scales and carried them to the comb-builders. These building bees would chew up pieces of wax in their mouths, mixing it with saliva, and then would press and mould it with their little trowel-like jaws against the comb, so as to build up steadily the familiar six-sided cells.

Each layer of comb is composed of a double tier or layer of these cells, a common part.i.tion or base serving as bottom of each tier. The cells to be used for brood are of two sizes, smaller ones for workers to be reared in, and larger ones for the drones. Sometimes the queen lays drone eggs in worker cells and then the cells have to be built up higher when the drone-grub gets too large for its cell. Sometimes, too, the worker bees lay eggs--this happens often in a hive bereft by some accident of its queen--but these eggs can only hatch into drones.

Occasionally the workers make a mistake and build a queen cell around a drone egg. This happened once in our hive when there were no queen-laid eggs in the brood-cells, and some workers had laid eggs.

The workers tried to make a new queen out of one of these eggs, but of course only a worthless drone came out of the queen cell. In building comb and cells for storing honey, new wax is almost exclusively used, but for brood-comb old wax and wax mixed with pollen may be used. Any comb or part of a comb not needed may be torn down and the wax used to build new comb or to cap cells with.

I have said that the nearest neighbors of Fuzzy's family are a lot of black German bees, housed in a larger house than Fuzzy's, but one also with gla.s.s sides so that we can see what goes on inside. The door of the house opens through the same large window as that of Fuzzy's house, but the foragers coming back from their long trips rarely make a mistake in the doors, the Germans coming to their door and the Italians to theirs. The German community is much the larger, there being probably thirty or forty thousand workers in it, although of course only one queen, and only a few hundred drones. Sometimes the foragers, both Germans and Italians, make the mistake of coming to the wrong window of the room in which their houses are. There are five large windows all alike in the west wall of this room, and often we find our bees b.u.mping against the other windows, especially the ones just next to the right one. They can't, of course, see in through these windows because the room is much darker than outside, and so all that the home-coming bees can see as they approach the building is a row of similar windows separated from each other by similar s.p.a.ces of buffy stone. And keen as our bees are in finding their way straight to their hives from distant flower-fields, this repet.i.tion of similar windows seems to confuse some of them.

But what I started to tell about is something that happened between the neighboring bee-houses quite different from the troubles of the bees finding their way home. It was something that gave Mary and me the princ.i.p.al excitement that we had in all our many days of watching bees.

Mary and I do not want to say that the German bees knew that a third of Fuzzy's community had swarmed out and gone away. Though how they could help knowing it really seems more a puzzle, for there was excitement and buzzing and window-sill covered and air full of bees enough to have told everybody within a rod of what was going on in the Italian house. But it was true that Fuzzy's community had never been troubled at all seriously by the belligerent Germans, until after it had been much reduced in strength by the loss of one-third of its members. And then this trouble did come, and came soon. So it looks as if the Germans realized the weakness of their neighbors. But perhaps not.

Just as our other exciting time beginning with the piping of the new queen and lasting until the subsequent swarming was a discovery of Mary's, so with this new time of high excitement; high excitement I may say both on our part and the bees'. Mary was in the room where the bees are, although not at the moment watching them, when she heard a sound of violent buzzing and humming. It grew quickly louder and shriller, and in a moment both communities were in an uproar.

It was a battle, a great battle. On the one hand, a struggle by brutal invaders intent on sacking the home and pillaging the stores of a community given to ways of peace and just now reduced in numbers by a migration or exodus from home of a large group of restless spirits; on the other hand, a struggle for home and property and the lives of hundreds of babies by this weak and presumably timid and unwarlike people. A great band of Germans were at the door of Fuzzy's house trying to get in! They buzzed and pushed and ran their stings in and out of their bodies, and crowded the entryway full. But the Italian workers and guards had roused their community, and pouring out from the hive into the narrow entry was a stream of angry and brave amber bees, ready to fight to the death for their home.

It was really a terrific struggle. The Italians, few in numbers as a community, were yet enough to oppose on fairly equal terms the band of Germans, for by no means all the Germans had come from their house.

And the Italians had the great advantage of being defenders. They had only to keep out the black column trying to force its way in through the narrow door and entry. And they were no laggards in battle. They fought with perfect courage and great energy. Often a small group of Italians would force its way out of the door and into the very midst of the Germans outside on the window-sill. These brave bees were all killed, overwhelmed by the superior numbers of the enemy. But not until they had left many dying Germans on the stone window-ledge were their own paralyzed and dying bodies hustled out of the way.

In many cases the combat took on the character of duels between single pairs of combatants. A German and an Italian would clasp each other with jaws and legs, and thus interlocked and whirling over and over with violent beating of their wings would stab at each other until one or both were mortally wounded. All the time the frenzied ball would be rolling nearer and nearer the outer edge of the treacherous sloping window-ledge, until finally over it would go, whirling in the air through the thirty feet of fall to the ground below. Here the struggle would go on, if the fighters were not too stunned by the fall, until one or both bees were dead or paralyzed.

It is really too painful to tell of this fight. And it was painful to watch. But the end came soon. And it was a glorious victory for Fuzzy and her companions. The German robbers flew back, what were left of them, to their own hive. Mary and I tried all through the fight to watch Fuzzy. But we saw her only once; she was in the entry then and nearly in the front row of fighters. We were glad to see her so brave, but fearful for her fate. After the fight we looked anxiously through the hive for our little white-spotted friend. We didn't see her, and were ready to mourn her for lost, when Mary happened to look out on the window-ledge where a few Italians were pushing the remaining paralyzed or dead Germans off. There was Fuzzy dragging, with much effort, a dead, black bee along the rough stone.

We were very happy, then, and wanted more than ever to be able to talk to our brave little champion and rejoice with her over the splendid victory. But we could only do as Fuzzy seemed to be doing. That is, take up again the work that lay at our hands. My work was to go into the lecture-room and talk to a cla.s.s about the absence of intelligence and mind and spirit in the lower animals and the dependence of their behavior upon physics and chemistry and mechanics! Mary's work was to go out into the poppy-field and talk with the little gra.s.s people whom she never sees or hears, but knows are there.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE ANIMATED HONEY-JARS]

ANIMATED HONEY-JARS

It was one evening not long after our afternoon on Bungalow Hill, where Mary had found the mealy-bugs in the runways of an ant's nest under a stone, and I had told her about the clever little brown ants and their aphid cattle in the Illinois corn-fields. Ever since that afternoon Mary had been asking questions about ants, and so this evening I was translating bits to her from a new German book about ants. It told about the cruel forays of the hordes of the great fighting and robbing Ecitons of the Amazons; of the extraordinary mutually helpful relations between the Aztec ants and the Imbauba tree of South America, which result in the ants getting a comfortable home and special food from the tree, while the tree gets protection through the Aztecs from the leaf-stealing Ecodomas. It told of the ants that live in the hollow leaves of the Dischidia plants in the Philippine Islands, and the way the plants get even by sending slender aerial rootlets into the leaves to feed on the dead bodies of the ants that die in the nests. It told of the ants in this country that build sheds of wood-pulp over colonies of honey-dew insects or ant-cattle on the stems of plants; of the fungus-garden ants of South America and Mexico and Texas that bite off little pieces of green leaves and make beds of them in special chambers in their underground nests, so that certain moulds grow on these leaf-beds and provide a special kind of food for the ant-gardeners. It told of the ants that make slaves of other ants, and get to depend so much on these slaves that they can't even care for their own children, and it told about the honey-ants of the Garden of the G.o.ds that make some of the workers in each nest--but that's what this story is going to tell about, so we had better wait.

But it was all a veritable fairy-story book, as any good book about the ways and life of ants must be. And Mary listened eagerly. She liked it. When going-home time came she had, however, one insistent question to ask. "What can I _see_?" she demanded. "What can I see right away; to-morrow?"

"Mary you can--see--to-morrow,"--and I think rapidly,--"you can see--to-morrow,"--still thinking,--"ah, yes--yes you _can_; you can see them to-morrow."

"But _what_ can I see to-morrow?"

"Why the animated honey-jars; didn't I say what? No? Well, to-morrow we can go to see them; in the Arboretum at the foot of the big Monterey pine. I think I remember the exact place."

"But I thought the honey-ants were only in Mexico and New Mexico and Colorado," says Mary. "Didn't the book say that?"

"Yes, that kind; but we have a kind of our own here in California. The sort that McCook found in the Garden of the G.o.ds and studied all that summer twenty-five years ago is found only there and in the Southwest, but there are two or three other kinds of honey-ants known, and one of them that has never been told about in the books at all is right here on the campus. There are several of the nests here, or were a few years ago, and we'll go to-morrow and try to find one. It will be fine, won't it?"

"Fine," said Mary. "Good-night."

And so the next morning we went. The Arboretum is a place where once were planted almost all the kinds of trees that grow wild in California, besides many other kinds from Australia and j.a.pan and New Zealand and Peru and Chili and several of the other Pacific Ocean countries. But the big, swift-growing eucalyptuses and Monterey pines have crowded out many of the other more tender and less-pushing kinds.

However, it is still a wonderful place of trees. Many birds live there; swift troops of the beautiful plumed California quails; crimson-throated Anna humming-birds, crestless California jays, fidgeting finches and juncos, s.p.u.n.ky sparrows and wrens, chattering chickadees and t.i.tmice, fierce little fly-catchers and kinglets. There are winding paths and little-used roads in it, and altogether it is a fine place to go when one has only a short hour for walking and seeing things.

And so Mary and I came with a garden-trowel and a gla.s.s fruit-jar to the foot of the big Monterey pine near the _toyon_. A _toyon_, if you are an Easterner and need telling, is the tree that bears the red berries for Christmas for us Pacific-Coasters. It is our holly, as the Ceanothus is our lilac, and the poison-oak is our autumn-red sumac.

At the foot of the Monterey pine we began our search for the honey-ants. We didn't, of course, expect to find them walking about with their swollen bodies full of amber honey, for the honey-bearers are supposed not to walk around, but to stay inside the nest, in a special chamber made for them. We looked rather for the honey-gatherers, the worker foragers.

Pretty soon Mary found a swift little black ant. But, no, it was an _Aphaenogaster_ that--

"A feeno-ga.s.ser?" asks Mary. "What is that?"

"That has the curious, flat-bodied dwarf crickets living with it in its nests," I continue. "_Myrmecophila_, the ant-lover, they call this little cricket which has lost its wings and its voice and is altogether an insignificant and meek little guest unbidden but tolerated at the ant's table. And here, here is a big black-and-brown carpenter-ant going home with a seed in its mouth."

"Where is its home? Does it build a house out of wood? Let's follow it," Mary bursts in.

"No, we are after honey-ants, remember. We mustn't let ourselves get distracted by all these others. The carpenter-ants do make themselves a home of wood, but they do it by gnawing out galleries and chambers in a dead tree trunk or stump or in a neglected timber. That isn't exactly building, but it is at least a kind of carpentering, a sort of--"

"Is this one?" interrupts Mary, poking violently at an angry red-headed little slave-maker ant that seemed anxious to get off to its home where its slaves, which are other ants captured when still young and unacquainted with their rightful family, do all the work of food-getting and cleaning and taking care of the babies.