Locusts and Wild Honey | Page 5

hive; they select and make ready the tree in
the woods and conduct the queen to it.
The peculiar office and sacredness of the queen consists in the fact that
she is the mother of the swarm, and the bees love and cherish her as a
mother and not as a sovereign. She is the sole female bee in the hive,
and the swarm clings to her because she is their life. Deprived of their
queen, and of all brood from which to rear one, the swarm loses all
heart and soon dies, though there be an abundance of honey in the hive.
The common bees will never use their sting upon the queen; if she is to
be disposed of, they starve her to death; and the queen herself will sting

nothing but royalty,--nothing but a rival queen.
The queen, I say, is the mother bee; it is undoubtedly complimenting
her to call her a queen and invest her with regal authority, yet she is a
superb creature, and looks every inch a queen. It is an event to
distinguish her amid the mass of bees when the swarm alights; it
awakens a thrill Before you have seen a queen, you wonder if this or
that bee, which seems a little larger than its fellows, is not she, but
when you once really set eyes upon her you do not doubt for a moment.
You know that is the queen. That long, elegant, shining,
feminine-looking creature can be none less than royalty. How
beautifully her body tapers, how distinguished she looks, how
deliberate her movements! The bees do not fall down before her, but
caress her and touch her person. The drones, or males, are large bees,
too, but coarse, blunt, broad-shouldered, masculine-looking. There is
but one fact or incident in the life of the queen that looks imperial and
authoritative: Huber relates that when the old queen is restrained in her
movements by the workers, and prevented from destroying the young
queens in their cells, she assumes a peculiar attitude and utters a note
that strikes every bee motionless and makes every head bow; while this
sound lasts, not a bee stirs, but all look abashed and humbled: yet
whether the emotion is one of fear, or reverence, or of sympathy with
the distress of the queen mother, is hard to determine. The moment it
ceases and she advances again toward the royal cells, the bees bite and
pull and insult her as before.
I always feel that I have missed some good fortune if I am away from
home when my bees swarm. What a delightful summer sound it is! how
they come pouring out of the hive, twenty or thirty thousand bees, each
striving to get out first! It is as when the dam gives way and lets the
waters loose; it is a flood of bees which breaks upward into the air, and
becomes a maze of whirling black lines to the eye, and a soft chorus of
myriad musical sounds to the ear. This way and that way they drift,
now contracting, now expanding, rising, sinking, growing thick about
some branch or bush, then dispersing and massing at some other point,
till finally they begin to alight in earnest, when in a few moments the
whole swarm is collected upon the branch, forming a bunch perhaps as

large as a two-gallon measure. Here they will hang from one to three or
four hours or until a suitable tree in the woods is looked up, when, if
they have not been offered a hive in the mean time, they are up and off.
In hiving them, if any accident happens to the queen the enterprise
miscarries at once. One day I shook a swarm from a small pear-tree
into a tin pan, set the pan down on a shawl spread beneath the tree, and
put the hive over it. The bees presently all crawled up into it, and all
seemed to go well for ten or fifteen minutes, when I observed that
something was wrong; the bees began to buzz excitedly and to rush
about in a bewildered manner, then they took to the wing and all
returned to the parent stock. On lifting up the pan, I found beneath it
the queen with three or four other bees. She had been one of the first to
fall, had missed the pan in her descent, and I had set it upon her. I
conveyed her tenderly back to the hive, but either the accident
terminated fatally with her, or else the young queen had been liberated
in the interim, and one of them had fallen in combat, for it was ten days
before the swarm issued a second time.
No one, to my knowledge, has ever seen