WHEN professional breeders of the honey-bee have succeeded in producing the much-desired non-swarming race, and swarming has become a thing of the past, naturalists of the old “instinct” school will be able to turn their backs on at least one very inconvenient question.
There is no denying that the breeders are theoretically right in their present efforts. The swarming-habit in the honey-bee is admittedly the main obstacle to large honey-takes; and now that two of the principal objects of swarming—the multiplication of stocks and renewal of queens—are fairly well understood, and can be artificially effected, there is no doubt that the universal adoption of a non-swarming strain throughout the bee-farms of the country, if such a thing were possible, would result in a very greatly increased honey-yield, and the people would get cheap honey. But at present it is not easy to see that any progress whatever in this direction has been made. The bees continue to swarm, in spite of beautifully adjusted theories; and the old attempt to fit the square peg of instinct into the round hole of fact goes on as merrily as ever.
Students of bee-life, approaching the matter unencumbered by ancient postulates, find themselves face to face with many surprising things, which would seem unexplainable on any other hypothesis than that the bees are endowed with reason, and that of no mean order.
Instinct implies invariability, a dead perfection of motive working blindly against all odds of circumstance, and always succeeding in the main. But the very essence of reason, humanly speaking, is its imperfection and continual deviation both in motive and performance. Watching a swarm of bees from the moment of its issue from the hive, the first thing that strikes the unacademic observer is that most of the bees seem to have no notion at all as to what the furore is about. They are by no means the obedient items of a common inexorable purpose. They are more like a crowd of people running in a street, all agog with excitement and curiosity, but not one of them knowing the cause of the general stampede. Sometimes a stock of bees will give visible sign of the approach of a swarming-fit for several days before the swarm actually issues. But, as often as not, no such manifestation is given. The hive, at least to the unexpert eye, seems in its normal condition right up to the moment when the great emigration takes place. And then, as at a given signal, the work suddenly stops, and the bees pour out of the hive-entrance in a living stream, darkening the air for many yards round, the cloud of darting bees rising higher and higher, and spreading over a greater space with every moment. The swarm may take three or four minutes to get fairly on the wing; and, from a populous hive, may number twenty-five or thirty thousand individuals.