When once the study of the inner life of the honey-bee has been undertaken, the watcher will soon realise that he has embarked on a stranger voyage than he ever contemplated, even in his most daring moments. In the old bee-garden there was a serenity, a quiet enduring bliss of ignorance, that chimed in well with his slothful, holiday mood. The sunshine, the flowers, the song of the wind in the tree-tops, and the drowsy song of the hives; the voice of the old white-headed cottager weaving in his listener’s ear the old, comfortable arabesque of error; the sudden, jubilant uproar of a swarm, filling the blue sky with music and the flash of unnumbered wings; the night-quiet, with its deep underground bee-murmur, its dim half-moon peering over the hill-top, the shadowy bent figure of the old beeman listening at hive-doors for the battle-cry of rival queens, that should mean trouble on the morrow—it all comes back to the watcher now as a haven he has left inconsiderately, for a voyage over unknown, stormy seas. For now, with the inner life of the hive going on unmasked before his very eyes, wonder succeeds wonder almost without a break; and each new fact that reveals itself is more perturbing, because more destructive of old, hallowed convention, than any that has gone before.
The hive that has lost its mother-bee, and failed to provide her with a fully developed, fertile successor, is seen to be rapidly declining in its worker-population, while the horde of drones is increasing at a greater rate than ever. But where do these drones come from, if the very fount of bee-life has been dried up at its source by the loss of a fertilised queen? The question brings the student to what is perhaps the most remarkable fact in the whole great book of natural history.
We are not concerned, for the moment, with theological matters; nor will the thread of the story of the honey-bee be laid down, however briefly, for an excursion into the pulpit. Yet here is something that may well give wherewithal for thought. For nearly two thousand years the Doctrine of the Virgin Birth has been the centre of a bitter human controversy. Its liegemen uphold it as a main article of faith, eternally exalted from the odious need of proof; its temperate opposers sadly and quietly set it aside as a natural impossibility. On one side the charge is want of faith; on the other of blind credulity. And yet no one seems to have thought of looking into paths of creation other than human, to see if no parallel exists that may help both sides, and send the swords to sheath before a common mystery. The honey-bee is small among the fowls, but here she looms large in the world, a portentous symbol. It is a fact, now incontestably proved, that the virgin queen-bee is capable of reproducing her kind, yet only the male of the species. If she is born late in the year, when no drones exist, and her fertilisation is therefore impossible, or if some imperfection of wing prevents her going out for her mating-flight, she will still set busily to work at her one function of egg-laying; and these eggs will all hatch out into male bees. The same thing occurs in the case of the queenless hive, which, having neither worker-egg nor worker-grub, whose age is under the three days’ limit, yet tries to raise a new queen from a larva perhaps four or even five days old. The queen thus created is queen only in name. She may have her ovaries completely developed, but otherwise she will be congenitally destitute. She will have neither the will nor power to receive the drone; and the eggs that she lays so industriously only add to the crowd of useless males that will soon be the sole representatives of the doomed household.