The Children's Life of the Bee Part 1

The Children's Life of the Bee.

by Maurice Maeterlinck.

I

ON THE THRESHOLD OF THE HIVE

I have not yet forgotten the first apiary I saw, where I learned to love the bees. It was many years ago, in a large village of Dutch Flanders, the sweet and pleasant country that rejoices in brilliant flowers; a country that gladly spreads out before us, as so many pretty toys, her illuminated gables and wagons and towers; her cupboards and clocks that gleam at the end of the pa.s.sage; her little trees marshaled in line along quays and ca.n.a.l-banks, waiting, one almost might think, for some splendid procession to pa.s.s; her boats and her barges with sculptured sterns, her flower-like doors and windows, her spotless dams and many-coloured drawbridges; and her little varnished houses, bright as new pottery, from which bell-shaped dames come forth, all a-glitter with silver and gold, to milk the cows in the white-hedged fields, or spread the linen on flowery lawns that are cut into patterns of oval and lozenge and are most amazingly green.

To this spot an aged philosopher had retired, having become a little weary; and here he had built his refuge. His happiness lay all in the beauties of his garden; and best-loved, and visited most often, were the bee-hives. There were twelve of them, twelve domes of straw; and some he had painted a bright pink, and some a clear yellow, but most were a tender blue, for he had noticed the fondness of the bees for this color. These hives stood against the wall of the house, in the angle formed by one of those pleasant and graceful Dutch kitchens whose earthenware dresser, all bright with copper and bra.s.s, was reflected through the open door on to the peaceful water of the ca.n.a.l. And the water, carrying these familiar images beneath its curtain of poplars, led one's eyes to a calm horizon of meadows and of mills.

Here, as in all places, the hives lent a new meaning to the flowers and the silence, the balm of the air and the rays of the sun. One seemed to have drawn very near to all that was happiest in nature. One was content to sit down and rest at this radiant cross-road, along which the busy and tuneful bearers of all country perfumes were incessantly pa.s.sing from dawn until dusk. One heard the musical voice of the garden, whose loveliest hours seemed to rejoice and to sing of their gladness. One came here, to the school of the bees, to be taught how nature is always at work, always scheming and planning; and to learn too the lesson of whole-hearted labor which is always to benefit others.

In order to follow, as simply as possible, the life of the bees through the year, we will take a hive that awakes in the Spring and duly starts on its labors; and then we shall meet, in their order, all the great events of the bees. These are, first of all, the formation and departure of the swarm; then, the foundation of the new city, the birth and flight of the young queens, the ma.s.sacre of the males, and, last of all, the return of the sleep of winter. We will try to give the reasons for each event, and to show the laws and habits that bring it about; and so, when we have arrived at the end of the bees' short year, which extends only from April to the last days of September, we shall have gazed on all the mysteries of the palace of honey.

Before we knock at the door, and let our inquisitive glance travel round, it need merely be said that the hive is composed of a queen, who is the mother of all her people; of thousands of female worker-bees, who are neuters or spinsters; and, finally, of some hundreds of males, who never do any work, and are known as drones.

When for the first time we take the cover off a hive we cannot help some feeling of fear, as though we were looking at something not meant for our eyes, something alarming and frightening. We have always thought of the bee as rather a dangerous creature. There is the distressful recollection of its sting, which produces so peculiar a pain that one knows not with what to compare it: a sort of dreadful dryness, as though a flame of the desert had scorched the wounded limb; and one asks oneself whether these daughters of the sun may not have distilled a dazzling poison from their father's rays, in order to defend the treasure which they have gathered during his shining hours.

There is no doubt that if some person, who neither knows nor respects the habits of the bee, were suddenly to fling open the hive, this would turn itself immediately into a burning-bush of heroism and fury; but the slight amount of skill needed to deal with the matter can be readily acquired. Let but a little smoke be deftly applied, let us be gentle and careful in our movements, and the heavily-armed workers will permit themselves to be robbed without the least thought of using their sting.

It is not the fact, as some people have stated, that the bees recognize their owner, nor have they any fear of man; but, when the smoke reaches them, when they become aware of what is happening, so quietly and without any haste or disturbance, they imagine that this is not the attack of an enemy against whom any defense is possible, but that it is some natural catastrophe, to which they will do well to submit. Instead of vainly struggling, therefore, their one thought is to safeguard their future; and they rush at once to their reserves of honey, into which they eagerly plunge themselves in order to possess the material for starting a new city immediately, no matter where, should the old one be destroyed or they compelled to abandon it.

A person who knows nothing of bees will be a little disappointed the first time he looks into a hive. Let us say that it is an observation-hive, made of gla.s.s, with black curtains and shutters and only one comb, thus enabling the spectator to study both sides. These hives can be placed in a drawing-room or a library without any inconvenience or danger. The bees that live in the one I have in my study in Paris are able--even in that great city--to do their own marketing, as it were--in other words, to find the food they require--and to prosper. You will have been told, when you are shown this little gla.s.s box, that it is the home of a most extraordinary activity; that it is governed by a number of wise laws, that it enshrines deep mysteries; and all you will see is a ma.s.s of little, reddish groups, somewhat resembling roasted coffee-berries or bunches of raisins, all huddled up against the gla.s.s. They look more dead than alive; their movements are slow, and seem confused and without any purpose. We ask ourselves, can these be the dazzling creatures we had seen, but a moment ago, flashing and sparkling as they darted among the pearls and the gold of a thousand wide-open flowers?

Now, in the darkness, they seem to be shivering; to be numbed, suffocated, so closely are they huddled together. They look as though they were prisoners; or shall we say queens who have lost their throne, who have had their one moment of glory in the midst of their radiant garden, and are now compelled to return to the dingy misery of their poor overcrowded home.

It is with them as it is with all the real things in life; they must be studied, and we have to learn how to study them.

Much is happening inside this ma.s.s that seems so inactive, but it will take you some time to grasp it and see it. The truth is that every single creature in the little groups that appear scarcely to move is hard at work, each one at its own particular trade. There is not one of them that knows what it means to be idle; and those, for instance, that seem fast asleep, as they hang in great cl.u.s.ters against the gla.s.s, are entrusted with the most mysterious and fatiguing task of all; it is their duty to create the marvelous wax. But we shall tell later, and in its place, precisely what each of the bees is doing; for the moment we will merely point out why it is that the different cla.s.ses of workers all cl.u.s.ter together so strangely. The fact is that the bee, even more than the ant, is only happy when she is in the midst of a crowd; she can only live in the crowd. When she leaves the hive, which is so densely packed that she has to keep on b.u.t.ting with her head in order to pa.s.s, she is out of her element, away from what she loves. She will dive for an instant into flower-filled s.p.a.ce, as the swimmer will dive into the sea that is filled with pearls; but, just as the swimmer must come to the surface and breathe the air, so must she, at regular intervals, return and breathe the crowd--or she will die. Take her away from her comrades, and however abundant the food may be, however gentle the climate, she will perish in a few days, not of hunger or cold, but merely of loneliness. She needs the crowd, she needs her own city, just as she needs the honey on which she lives. This craving for companionship in some way helps us to understand the nature of the laws that govern the hive. For in these laws the individual bee, the one bee apart from the other, simply does not count. Her entire life is sacrifice, and only sacrifice, to the bees as a race; as it were, to the everlasting community, of which she forms part.

This, however, has not always been the case, for there is a lower order of bees that prefers to work alone, and very miserably too, sometimes never seeing its young, and at others, like the b.u.mble-bee, living in the midst of its own little family. From these we arrive, through one stage after another, to the almost perfect but pitiless society of our hives, where the individual bee exists only for the republic of which it forms a part, and where that republic itself will at all times be sacrificed in the interests of the immortal city of the future.

II

THE SWARM

We will now leave our observation hive, and, in order to get nearer to nature, consider the different events of the swarm as they come to pa.s.s in an ordinary hive, which is about ten times larger than the other, and offers entire freedom to the bees.

Here, then, they have shaken off the sluggishness of winter. The queen started laying her eggs in the very first days of February, and the workers have gone in streams to the willows and nuttrees, the gorse and violets, anemones and lungworts. Then Spring comes upon the earth, and in the hive honey and pollen abound in cellar and attic, while each day sees the birth of thousands of bees. The overgrown males now all sally forth from their cells, and sun themselves on the combs. So crowded does the city become that hundreds of workers, coming back from the flowers in the evening, will vainly seek shelter within, and will be forced to spend the night on the threshold of the hive, where many will die from the cold.

The inhabitants of the hive become restless, and the old queen begins to stir. She feels that there is something to be done; something strange, that she has to do. So far, she has religiously fulfilled her duty as a good mother; but, to her, the accomplishment of this duty will bring no reward. An unknown power threatens her tranquillity; she will soon be forced to quit this city of hers, where she has so long reigned. But this city has been made by her. She is not its queen in the sense in which men use the word. She gives no orders; she obeys, as meekly as the humblest of her subjects, the hidden power that for the present we will call the "spirit of the hive." But she is the mother of the city; its inhabitants are all her children. It is she who has founded it, brought it together out of nothing, triumphed over the uncertainty and poverty of its beginning; it is she who has peopled it; and those who move within its walls--the workers, the males, the larvae, the nymphs and young princesses--she is the mother of them all.

What is this "spirit of the hive"--where is it to be found? It is not like the special instinct that teaches the bird to build its well-planned nest, and then seek other skies when winter threatens. It is not a fixed and unchanging habit; it is not a law that deals with special cases. On the contrary, it deals with all cases; it studies them, watches them--and then gives orders for the right thing to be done--just as a faithful steward might do who had only the interests of his master at heart.

It deals unmercifully with the wealth and the happiness, the liberty and the life, of all this winged people; and yet it always acts with judgment and wisdom, as though it were itself directed by some overpowering duty. It is the "spirit of the hive" that decides how many bees shall be born every day, arranging this in accordance with the number of flowers that gladden the country-side. It is the "spirit of the hive" that warns the queen when it is time to depart, that compels her to allow the young princesses to come into the world, although these princesses shall be her own rivals. Or perhaps, when the season is on the wane, and the flowers are growing less plentiful, the spirit will instruct the workers to do away with the princesses, so that there may be no chance of disturbance, and work may once again become the sole object of all.

The spirit of the hive is prudent and wise, but never n.i.g.g.ardly. In the glad summer days of sunshine and plenty it permits three or four hundred males to exist in the hive--pompous, useless, noisy creatures, who are greedy and dirty, vulgar and arrogant; but, one morning when the flowers are beginning to close earlier and open later, the spirit will quietly issue instructions that every male shall be killed. It draws up a sort of time-table for each one of the workers, allotting them tasks in accordance with their age; it selects the nurses who attend to the larvae, and the ladies of honor who wait on the queen and never by any chance let her out of their sight. It has given the necessary orders to the house-bees who air and warm the hive by fanning their wings, thereby also helping the honey to settle; to the architects, masons, waxworkers and sculptors who form the mysterious curtain and build the combs; to the foragers who sally forth to the flowers in search of the nectar that turns into honey, of the pollen that feeds the larvae, and of the water and salt required by the youth of the city.

It is the spirit of the hive that has chosen the chemists whose business it is to keep the honey sweet and fresh by allowing a drop of formic acid to fall in from the end of their sting; the capsule-makers, who seal up the provision-cells when these are filled; the sweepers, who clean the streets and public places of the hive; and the guards who all day and all night keep watch on the threshold, who question all comers and goers, recognize the young bees as they return from their very first flight, scare away vagabonds, loafers and trespa.s.sers, expel all intruders, and, if need be, block up and defend the entrance to the hive.

And, last of all, it is the spirit of the hive which decides on the hour at which the bees shall swarm; the hour, that is, when we find a whole people, who have reached the very height of prosperity and power, suddenly abandoning, in favor of the generation that is to follow, all their wealth and their palaces, their homes and the fruits of their labor, content themselves to face the perils and hardships of a journey into a new and distant country. This act will always bring poverty with it and sometimes ruin; and the people who once were so happy are scattered abroad in obedience to a law that they recognize to be greater than their own happiness.

These things that happen to the bee are regarded by us in the way we regard most things that happen in the world. We note some of the bees'

habits; we say, they do this, and do that, they work in such and such a way, this is how their queens are born; we observe that the workers are all females and that they swarm at a certain time. And having said this, we think that we know them, and ask nothing more. We watch them hastening from flower to flower, we see the constant movement within the hive; and we tell ourselves that we understand all about their life. But the moment that we try to come nearer the truth, to see more clearly, we find puzzling questions confronting us, questions as to what part is played by destiny and what part by will, how much is due to intelligence and how much to nature; difficult questions, these, that are never absent even from the most simple acts of our own daily life.

Our hive, then, is preparing to swarm, making ready for the great sacrifice to the generation that is to come. In obedience to the order given by the "spirit of the hive," sixty or seventy thousand bees out of the eighty or ninety thousand that form the whole population, will forsake their old city at a given hour. They will not be leaving it at a moment of great unhappiness; they have not suddenly made up their minds to abandon a home that has been rendered miserable by hunger or illness, or ruined by war. No; on the contrary, preparations have for a long time been made, and the hour most favorable for departure patiently awaited.

If the hive were poor, or had suffered from storm or robbery; or if some misfortune had befallen the royal family, the bees would not dream of going away. They do this only when everything is at its very best in the hive; at a time when, thanks to the enormous amount of work done in the spring, the immense palace of wax has its 120,000 well-arranged cells overflowing with honey and with the many-colored flour, known as "bees'

bread," on which the larvae are fed.

Never is the hive more beautiful than on the eve of its great sacrifice.

Let us try to imagine it for ourselves--not as it appears to the bee, for we cannot tell what it looks like to her, seen through the triple eye on her brow and the six or seven thousand facets of the eyes on her side--but as it would seem to us, were we no bigger than she is. From the height of a dome greater than that of St. Peter's at Rome waxen walls descend to the ground; and these walls, although they have all been built in the dark, are more perfect, more wonderful, than any that have been erected by human hands. Each one, smelling so fresh and so sweet, contains thousands of cells that are stored with provisions; enough, indeed, to feed the whole population for weeks. Here, too, are transparent cells filled with the pollen of every flower of spring, making brilliant splashes of red and yellow, of black and mauve. Close by, sealed with a seal to be broken only in days of distress, is the honey of April, clearest and most perfumed of all, stored in twenty thousand vats, which look like a long and beautiful embroidery of gold, with borders that hang stiff and rigid. Lower down still, the honey of May is maturing, in huge open tanks, that are fanned all the time by watchful, untiring guardians. In the center, in the warmest part of the hive, are the royal nurseries, the domain set apart for the queen and her attendants; here also are about 16,000 cells wherein the eggs repose, 15 or 16,000 chambers occupied by the youthful bees, and 40,000 rooms filled with infants in their cradles, cared for by thousands of nurses. And, last of all, in the most secret and private quarters, are the three, four, six or twelve sealed palaces, vast in size compared with the others, where the growing princesses lie who await their hour; wrapped in a kind of shroud, all of them motionless and pale, and fed in the darkness.

The appointed day arrives, the one that has been chosen by the "spirit of the hive"; and a certain part of the population will at once sally forth. In the sleeping city there remain the males, the very young bees that look after the brood-cells, and some thousands of workers who go on gathering honey, guarding the treasure, and keeping up the moral atmosphere of the hive. For it must be understood that each hive has its own moral code; some are admirable in every respect, while others have fallen away sadly from the paths of virtue. A careless bee-keeper will often spoil his people, and cause them to lose respect for the property of others, whereby they will become a danger to all the hives around.

They will give up the hundreds of visits to neighboring flowers that are necessary in order to form one drop of honey, and will prefer to force their way into other hives, that are too weak for selfdefense, and to rob these of the fruit of their labors; and it is very difficult to bring back to the paths of duty a hive that shall have become so depraved.

All things go to prove that it is not the queen, but the "spirit of the hive," that fixes on the hour for the swarm. This queen of ours, like many a leader among men, is herself compelled to obey commands that are far more important, and far more secret, than those which she gives to her subjects. At break of dawn, or perhaps a night or two before, the word will be given; and scarcely has the sun drunk in the first drops of dew when a most unusual stir may be noticed inside and all around the buzzing hive. Sometimes, too, for day after day before the actual swarming takes place, one will find a curious excitement, for which there would seem no cause, that suddenly appears, and as suddenly vanishes, in the golden, gleaming throng. One asks oneself, has a cloud that we cannot see crept across the sky that the bees are watching; or is it their mere sorrow at the thought of leaving? Has a council of bees been summoned to consider whether they really must go? Of all this we know nothing; we do know that the "spirit of the hive" has no difficulty in letting its message be known to the mult.i.tude. Certain as it may seem that the bees are able to communicate with each other, we cannot tell whether this is done in our human fashion. It is possible that they themselves do not hear their own song, the murmur that comes to us heavily laden with perfume of honey, the joyous whisper of fairest summer days that the bee-keeper loves so well, the festival song of labor that rises and falls around the hive, and that might almost be the chant of the eager flowers, the voice of the white carnation, the marjoram, and the thyme.

Certain sounds that the bees put forth, however, can be readily understood by us, sounds that convey anger, sorrow, rejoicing or threats. They have their songs of abundance, when the harvest is plentiful, their psalms of grief and the chorus they chant to the queen; and at the time when she is being chosen the young princesses will send forth long and mysterious warcries.... It is quite possible that the sounds we ourselves make do not reach the bees; in any event these sounds do not seem in the least to disturb them, but are regarded by the bees perhaps as not intended for them, not in their world, and anyhow of no interest. In the same way perhaps we too only hear a very small part of the sounds that the bees produce, and there may be many of which we are ignorant. We soon shall be shown how quickly they contrive to understand each other, and how each one is told precisely the right thing to do, when, for instance, that great honey-thief, the dreadful moth that bears a death's head on its back, forces its way into the hive, humming its own strange song. The news travels quickly from group to group; and from the guards on the threshold to the workers on the most distant combs, the whole population of the hive becomes suddenly alert and eager, and trembles with fear.

For a long time it was thought that when these clever bees, usually so prudent and well-advised, left the treasures of their kingdom and sought a future that was so full of uncertainty, they were obeying some foolish impulse, some suggestion that had no especial meaning. It is our habit, when we consider the bees, to say that all that we do not as yet understand is just due to fate, that it happens because it had to happen. But now that we have discovered two or three of the secrets of the hive, we have learned why it is that the bees swarm; the reason being merely that the generation at present in the hive has thought it its duty to sacrifice itself on behalf of the generation that is to come.

The fact that this is the case can easily be proved. If the bee-keeper chooses to destroy the young queens in their cells, to enlarge the store-houses and dormitories in the hive, all the restlessness, confusion, the stir and the worry, would at once disappear. The bees would immediately take up their work again and revisit the flowers; the old queen, having no one to fill her place, would give up her great desire for the light of the sun, and decide to remain where she was. All her doubts as to the future being now set at rest, she would peacefully continue her labors, which consist in the laying of two or three thousand eggs a day, as she pa.s.ses from cell to cell, omitting none, and never pausing to rest.

This particular hive, however, that we are now watching, has not been interfered with by man; the bees have been left to do what seemed right to them. On the appointed day then, the beautiful day, whose dawn, still moist with the dew, comes nearer and nearer beneath the trees, approaching with radiant and glowing steps, the bees all become impatient, and feverishly restless. Over the whole surface of the golden corridors that divide the walls of the hive, the workers are busily making preparations for the journey. Each one will first of all provide herself with honey sufficient for five or six days. From this honey that they carry within them they will distil the wax needed to build the new home. They will take with them also some kind of solid substance with which they will afterwards block up all the holes, strengthen weak places, varnish the walls and shut out the light; for the bees love to work in complete darkness, guiding themselves with their wonderful eyes, or perhaps with their antennae, or feelers, which very possibly possess some sense, unknown to us, that enables them to triumph over the darkness.

This is the most dangerous day in the life of the bee; it is full of the most dreadful possibilities; and the bees are well aware of it. Thinking of nothing now but their mighty adventure, they will have no time to visit the gardens and meadows; and to-morrow, and after to-morrow, it may rain, or there may be wind; their wings may be frozen and the flowers refuse to open. They would soon die of hunger; no one would come to help them, and they would seek help from none. For one city knows not the other, and a.s.sistance never is given. And even if the bee-keeper place the new hive by the side of the old one, the queen and her cl.u.s.ter of bees would not dream of returning to the safety and wealth of the home they had left, no matter what hardships they might have to endure; and all, one by one, and down to the last of them, would perish of hunger and cold around their unhappy queen rather than go back to the hive where they were born.

This is a thing, some people might say, that men would not do; it is a proof that the bee cannot have much intelligence. Is this so certain?

Other creatures may have an intelligence that is different from ours, and produces different results; and yet it does not follow that they are inferior to us. Are we so readily able to understand of what the people are thinking whom we see, perhaps, talking behind a closed window or moving about in the street? Or let us suppose that an inhabitant of Venus or Mars were to look down from the top of a mountain, and watch us, who to him would seem mere little black specks, as we come and go in the streets and squares of our towns. Would the mere sight of our movements, our buildings, machines and ca.n.a.ls, give him any very real idea of ourselves? All he could do, like ourselves as we gaze at the hive, would be to take note of one or two facts that seem very extraordinary. And from these facts he would jump at conclusions that would be just as uncertain as those that it pleases us to form concerning the bee.

"What are they aiming at, what are they trying for?" he would wonder, after years and years of patient watching. "I can see nothing that seems to direct their actions. The little things that one day they collect and build up, the next they destroy and scatter. In a great many cases their conduct is quite extraordinary. There are some men, for instance, who seem to do no work and hardly to stir from their place. They can be told from the others by their glossier coat, and also by their being generally fatter. They live in buildings ten or twenty times bigger than those of the workers, very much richer, and full of little ingenious contrivances. They spend a great many hours every day at their meals, of which they take a great number. They appear to be held in high honor by all who come near them; and have numbers of men and women to wait on them, to feed them and look after them. It can only be a.s.sumed that these persons must be of the greatest use and service to the country, but I have so far not been able to discover what this service may be.

There are others who do nothing but work, and work very hard indeed, in great sheds full of wheels that are always turning round and round, or in dark and dirty hovels, or on small plots of earth that from sunrise to sunset they are always digging and delving. It is certain that this labor must be an offense, and one which is punished. For the persons who are guilty of it are lodged in wretched little houses, in which there is absolutely no comfort at all, and very often no light and no air. They are clothed in some colorless sort of hide. They are so madly fond of the foolish things they are doing that they scarcely allow themselves time to eat or to sleep. In numbers they are to the others as a thousand to one. The curious thing is that, apart from this extraordinary craving for their work--which would seem to be very tiring--they appear to be quite gentle and harmless, and satisfied with the leavings of those who are evidently the guardians, if not the saviors, of the race."