The Life of the Bee | Page 9

help to explain the spirit of the laws of the hive. For in
them the individual is noting, her existence conditional only, and
herself, for one indifferent moment, a winged organ of the race. Her
whole life is an entire sacrifice to the manifold, everlasting being
whereof she forms part. It is strange to note that it was not always so.
We find even to-day, among the melliferous hymenoptera, all the
stages of progressive civilisation of our own domestic bee. At the
bottom of the scale we find her working alone, in wretchedness, often
not seeing her offspring (the Prosopis, the Colletes, etc.); sometimes

living in the midst of the limited family that she produces annually (as
in the case of the humble-bee). Then she forms temporary associations
(the Panurgi, the Dasypodoe, the Hacliti, etc.) and at last we arrive,
through successive stages, at the almost perfect but pitiless society of
our hives, where the individual is entirely merged in the republic, and
the republic in its turn invariably sacrificed to the abstract and immortal
city of the future.
[8]
Let us not too hastily deduce from these facts conclusions that apply to
man. He possesses the power of withstanding certain of nature's laws;
and to know whether such resistance be right or wrong is the gravest
and obscurest point in his morality. But it is deeply interesting to
discover what the will of nature may be in a different world; and this
will is revealed with extraordinary clearness in the evolution of the
hymenoptera, which, of all the inhabitants of this globe, possess the
highest degree of intellect after that of man. The aim of nature is
manifestly the improvement of the race; but no less manifest is her
inability, or refusal, to obtain such improvement except at the cost of
the liberty, the rights, and the happiness of the individual. In proportion
as a society organises itself, and rises in the scale, so does a shrinkage
enter the private life of each one of its members. Where there is
progress, it is the result only of a more and more complete sacrifice of
the individual to the general interest. Each one is compelled, first of all,
to renounce his vices, which are acts of independence. For instance, at
the last stage but one of apiarian civilisation, we find the humble-bees,
which are like our cannibals. The adult workers are incessantly
hovering around the eggs, which they seek to devour, and the mother
has to display the utmost stubbornness in their defence. Then having
freed himself from his most dangerous vices, each individual has to
acquire a certain number of more and more painful virtues. Among the
humble-bees, for instance, the workers do not dream of renouncing
love, whereas our domestic bee lives in a state of perpetual chastity.
And indeed we soon shall show how much more she has to abandon, in
exchange for the comfort and security of the hive, for its architectural,
economic, and political perfection; and we shall return to the evolution
of the hymenoptera in the chapter devoted to the progress of the
species.

II
THE SWARM

[9]
WE will now, so as to draw more closely to nature, consider the
different episodes of the swarm as they come to pass in an ordinary
hive, which is ten or twenty times more populous than an observation
one, and leaves the bees entirely free and untrammelled.
Here, then, they have shaken off the torpor of winter. The queen started
laying again in the very first days of February, and the workers have
flocked to the willows and nut-trees, gorse and violets, anemones and
lungworts. Then spring invades the earth, and cellar and stream with
honey and pollen, while each day beholds the birth of thousands of
bees. The overgrown males now all sally forth from their cells, and
disport themselves on the combs; and so crowded does the too
prosperous city become that hundreds of belated workers, coming back
from the flowers towards evening, will vainly seek shelter within, and
will be forced to spend the night on the threshold, where they will be
decimated by the cold. Restlessness seizes the people, and the old
queen begins to stir. She feels that a new destiny is being prepared. She
has religiously fulfilled her duty as a good creatress; and from this duty
done there result only tribulation and sorrow. An invincible power
menaces her tranquillity; she will soon be forced to quit this city of hers,
where she has reigned. But this city is her work, it is she, herself. She is
not its queen in the sense in which men use the word. She issues no
orders; she obeys, as meekly as the humblest of her subjects, the
masked power, sovereignly wise, that for the