The Life of the Bee. Maurice Maeterlinck

noticed, long before Sir John Lubbock's demonstrations, the bees' fondness for this colour.

      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 tin, reflected itself through the open door on to the peaceful canal. And the water, burdened with these familiar images beneath its curtain of poplars, led one's eyes to a calm horizon of mills and of meadows.

      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 the festival spirit of nature. One was content to rest at this radiant crossroad, where the aerial ways converge and divide that the busy and tuneful bearers of all country perfumes unceasingly travel from dawn unto dusk. One heard the musical voice of the garden, whose loveliest hours revealed their rejoicing soul and sang of their gladness. One came hither, to the school of the bees, to be taught the preoccupations of all-powerful nature, the harmonious concord of the three kingdoms, the indefatigable organisation of life, and the lesson of ardent and disinterested work; and another lesson too, with a moral as good, that the heroic workers taught there, and emphasised, as it were, with the fiery darts of their myriad wings, was to appreciate the somewhat vague savour of leisure, to enjoy the almost unspeakable delights of those immaculate days that revolved on themselves in the fields of space, forming merely a transparent globe, as void of memory as the happiness without alloy.

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      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 labours; and then we shall meet, in their natural order, all the great episodes, viz.: the formation and departure of the swarm, the foundation of the new city, the birth, combat and nuptial flight of the young queens, the massacre of the males, and finally, the return of the sleep of winter. With each of these episodes there will go the necessary explanations as to the laws, habits, peculiarities and events that produce and accompany it; so that, when arrived at the end of the bee's short year, which extends only from April to the last days of September, we shall have gazed upon all the mysteries of the palace of honey. Before we open it, therefore, and throw a general glance around, we only need say that the hive is composed of a queen, the mother of all her people; of thousands of workers or neuters who are incomplete and sterile females; and lastly of some hundreds of males, from whom one shall be chosen as the sole and unfortunate consort of the queen that the workers will elect in the future, after the more or less voluntary departure of the reigning mother.

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      The first time that we open a hive there comes over us an emotion akin to that we might feel at profaning some unknown object, charged perhaps with dreadful surprise, as a tomb. A legend of menace and peril still clings to the bees. There is the distressful recollection of her sting, which produces a pain so characteristic that one knows not wherewith to compare it; a kind of destroying dryness, a flame of the desert rushing over the wounded limb, as though these daughters of the sun had distilled a dazzling poison from their father's angry rays, in order more effectively to defend the treasure they gather from his beneficent hours.

      It is true that were some one who neither knows nor respects the customs and character of the bee suddenly to fling open the hive, it would turn at once into a burning bush of heroism and anger; but the slight amount of skill needed to handle it with impunity can be most readily acquired. Let but a little smoke be deftly applied, much coolness and gentleness be shown, and our well-armed workers will suffer themselves to be despoiled without dreaming of drawing their sting. It is not the fact, as some have maintained, that the bees recognise their master; nor have they any fear of man; but at the smell of the smoke, at the large slow gestures that traverse their dwellings without threatening them, they imagine that this is not the attack of an enemy against whom defence is possible, but that it is a force or a natural catastrophe whereto they do well to submit.

      Instead of vainly struggling, therefore, they do what they can to safeguard the future; and, obeying a foresight that for once is in error, they fly to their reserves of honey, into which they eagerly dip in order to possess within themselves the wherewithal to start a new city, immediately and no matter where, should the ancient one be destroyed or they be compelled to forsake it.

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      The first impression of the novice before whom an observation-hive* is opened will be one of some disappointment. He had been told that this little glass case contained an unparalleled activity, an infinite number of wise laws, and a startling amalgam of mystery, experience, genius, calculation, science, of various industries, of certitude and prescience, of intelligent habits and curious feelings and virtues. All that he sees is a confused mass of little reddish groups, somewhat resembling roasted coffee-berries, or bunches of raisins piled against the glass. They look more dead than alive; their movements are slow, incoherent, and incomprehensible. Can these be the wonderful drops of light he had seen but a moment ago, unceasingly flashing and sparkling, as they darted among the pearls and the gold of a thousand wide-open calyces?

      By observation-hive is meant a hive of glass, furnished with black curtains or shutters. The best kind have only one comb, thus permitting both faces to be studied. These hives can be placed in a drawing-room, library, etc., without inconvenience or danger. The bees that inhabit the one I have in my study in Paris are able even in the stony desert of that great city, to find the wherewithal to nourish themselves and to prosper.

      They appear to be shivering in the darkness, to be numbed, suffocated, so closely are they huddled together; one might fancy they were ailing captives, or queens dethroned, who have had their one moment of glory in the midst of their radiant garden, and are now compelled to return to the shameful squalor of their poor overcrowded home.

      It is with them as with all that is deeply real; they must be studied, and one must learn how to study them. The inhabitant of another planet who should see men and women coming and going almost imperceptibly through our streets, crowding at certain times around certain buildings, or waiting for one knows not what, without apparent movement, in the depths of their dwellings, might conclude therefrom that they, too, were miserable and inert. It takes time to distinguish the manifold activity contained in this inertia.

      And indeed every one of the little almost motionless groups in the hive is incessantly working, each at a different trade. Repose is unknown to any; and such, for instance, as seem the most torpid, as they hang in dead clusters against the glass, are intrusted with the most mysterious and fatiguing task of all: it is they who secrete and form the wax. But the details of this universal activity will be given in their place. For the moment we need only call attention to the essential trait in the nature of the bee which accounts for the extraordinary agglomeration of the various workers. The bee is above all, and even to a greater extent than the ant, a creature of the crowd. She can live only in the midst of a multitude. When she leaves the hive, which is so densely packed that she has to force her way with blows of her head through the living walls that enclose her, she departs from her proper element. She will dive for an instant into flower-filled space, as the swimmer will dive into the sea that is filled with pearls, but under pain of death it behoves her at regular intervals to return and breathe the crowd as the swimmer must return and breathe the air. Isolate her, and however abundant the food or favourable the temperature, she will expire in a few days not of hunger or cold, but of loneliness. From the crowd, from the city, she derives an invisible aliment that is as necessary to her as honey. This craving will help to explain the spirit of the laws of the hive. For in them the individual is nothing, 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