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Insect Stories

<h2>IN FUZZY'S GLASS HOUSE</h2> Fuzzy was distinguished from most of her brothers and sisters, when we first became acquainted with her, by the fine head of hair which she had. It has been several weeks now since we first saw her, and there are bald places already—so strenuous has been her life. To be sure that we should be able to recognize her even after she became worn and bald, like the others, we dabbed a spot of white paint on her back between the shoulders, and although old age and its attendant ills, including the loss of much of her hair, have come on rapidly, the white spot is still there, and we know Fuzzy whenever we see her. We were watching what was going on in Fuzzy's glass house at the very time that[Pg 214] Fuzzy first came out of her six-sided little private nursery room. In this she had spent all of her three weeks of getting hatched from an egg—we had seen her own very egg laid by the queen mother!—then of living as a helpless baby bee without wings or feet or eyes or feelers, and having to be fed bee-jelly and bee-bread by the nurses, and then as a slowly maturing young bee with legs and wings and eyes and feelers all forming and growing. Part of this time she had been shut up in her room by having the door sealed with wax, and she had had no food at all. But she had been fed enough at first to last her through the days when she had no food. It was the twentieth or twenty-first day since she had been born, that is, had hatched from the little, long, white, seed-like egg that the queen bee had laid in this six-sided waxen room or cell. And Fuzzy was all ready to come out into the world. [Pg 215] So she tried her strong new trowel-like jaws on the thin waxen door of her room, and found no trouble at all in biting a hole through it large enough to let her wriggle out. Which she did right under our very eyes. <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/i030.jpg" width-obs="400" height-obs="569" alt="" /></div> Indeed we had planned Fuzzy's glass house and had had it built in the way you see it in Sekko's picture just so we could see plainly and certainly what goes on in the house of a bee family. Everybody has watched bees outside gather pollen and drink nectar and hang in great swarms, and do the various other things they do in their outdoor life. But not everybody has seen what goes on indoors. Many people have seen the inside of a hive every now and then. But it is always when the bees are greatly excited and often when the people are too. And so besides seeing that the honey and pollen are in such and such combs and cells and the young bees in others, some of them in open and some [Pg 216] in closed cells, and perhaps a few other things, one doesn't learn much by peering into a hive through a mass of smoke-dazed bees while dodging a few extra-lively and energetic ones! Mary and I had watched bees outside and we had looked into lots of hives and, of course, had learned a little about indoor bee ways. But ever since we got Fuzzy's glass-sided house built and a community of pretty amber-bodied gentle Italians living in it, we have never got over being sorry for ourselves in the old days and sorry for other people all the time. For it is so easy and sure, so vastly entertaining and utterly fascinating to sit quietly and comfortably in chairs (one of us on each side) for hours together and see all the many things that go on in the bee's house. The bees are not disturbed in the slightest by our having the black cloth jacket off of the hive and by the light shining in through the great window-like sides[Pg 217] of the house, nor by Mary's bright eyes and my round spectacles staring ever so hard at them. We have seen the queen lay her eggs, the little bees hatch out, the nurse bees feed them, the foragers come in and dance their whirling dervish dance and unload their baskets of pollen and sacs of honey, the wax-makers hang in heavy festoons and make wax, the carrying bees carry the wax to the comb-builders, and the comb-builders build comb of it, the house-cleaners and the ventilators clean house and ventilate, and the guards stopping intruders at the door. We have heard the piping of the new queens in their big thimble-like cells, and seen them come out, and the terrible excitement and sometimes awful tragedy that follows; we have seen the wild ecstasy that comes before swarming out, and the swarming itself begin in the house; we have looked in at night and found some of the bees resting, but others working, and[Pg 218] always some on guard; we have seen the lazy drones loaf all the morning and then swing out on their midday flight and come back and fall to drinking honey again; we have seen a great battle when our gentle Italians fought like demons and repulsed a fierce attack of foraging black Germans, and again a nomad band of yellow-jackets; and we have seen the provident workers kill the drones and even drag young worker bees from their cells when the first cold weather comes on. We have seen, in truth, a very great deal of all the wonderful life that these wise and versatile little creatures live in their nearly perfect cooperative community. But above all we have followed with special interest and affectionate pride the education and experiences of Fuzzy, our most particular friend in all the thousands of our gentle Italian family. Fuzzy must have been very glad to get out finally from her tight, dark, little cell[Pg 219] and into the airy, light hive, with all of her sisters and brothers moving around so lively and busily. And she must have been especially delighted when she went to the open door of the house for a peek out—for she wasn't allowed really to go outdoors for exactly eight days—and saw the beautiful arcades of the outer Quadrangle underneath her and the red-tiled roof on a level with her, and then the great eucalyptus trees and the beautiful live-oaks in the field beyond, and far off on the horizon the crest of the distant mountains, with the giant redwoods standing up against the sky-line. You have a glimpse in Sekko's picture of all this that Fuzzy saw that day. That is, if she could see so much. I am afraid she couldn't. "But what are those other bees doing to her," cried Mary in some alarm, as two or three workers crowded around Fuzzy just as she came from her cell. "Are they trying to bite her?" [Pg 220] "Not the least in the world," I hasten to answer reassuringly. "Just look sharp and you will see." And Mary did look sharp and did see. And she clapped her hands with glee. "Why, they are licking her with their long tongues; cleaning her, just as a cat does her little kittens," sang Mary. Which was exactly so. For a bee just out from its nursery cell is a very mussed-up looking, and, I expect, rather dirty little creature. And it needs cleaning. It was soon after Fuzzy had got cleaned and had her hair brushed and had begun to wander around in an aimless way in the glass-sided house that we got hold of her and dabbed the spot of white paint on her back. We did it this way. She had walked up to just under the roof of the house near where you see (in Sekko's picture) one of the cork-stoppers sticking up like a little chimney-pot. These corks stop up two round holes in the roof which[Pg 221] we had made for the express purpose of putting things,—other insects, say,—into the hive to see what the bees would do with them, and also to take out a bee when we wanted to experiment with it. When Fuzzy got up just under one of the holes, we took the cork-stopper out gently and thus let her come walking slowly up and out on top of the roof. Then we caught and held her very gently with a pair of flat-bladed tweezers, and put the white paint on. Then we dropped her back through the hole and put the cork in its hole. We watched Fuzzy for a long time after she came out of her cell that day, and although she walked about a great deal, she only once ventured near the real door or entrance-slit of the hive through which the foraging bees were constantly coming and going. And next day we watched many hours and looked often between regular watching times, always finding[Pg 222] Fuzzy in the house. And so for eight days. And then she made her first excursion outside. It was interesting to watch her on this eighth day. She would fly a little way out, then turn around and come in. Then she would fly out farther, turn around, hover a little in front of the window, and finally come in again. A lot of other young bees were doing the same thing. They seemed to be getting acquainted with things around the door of the house so they would know how to find it when they came back from a long trip. On the ninth day Fuzzy brought in her first loads of pollen, two great masses of dull rose-red pollen held securely in the pollen-baskets on her hind legs. And after that she brought many other loads of pollen and later sacs of honey. But you must not imagine that Fuzzy was idle during all those eight days before she went outside of the glass house. Not[Pg 223] a bit of it. No bees are idle. But yes, the drones. Big, blunt-bodied, hairy, blundersome creatures that move slowly about over the combs. Not over the nursery combs where there is work to be done, feeding and caring for the young bees. Dear me, no. But over the pantry combs. They keep close to the honey-pots and bread-jars. But even they have their work. Each day from spring into late summer they all, or nearly all, fly out about eleven o'clock and circle and traverse the air for long distances in search of queens. Then in the early afternoon they come back and fall to sipping honey again. However, to return to Fuzzy and her work in those first eight days spent all inside the house. One day Mary saw Fuzzy stretching her head down into one open cell after another in the brood-comb. At the bottom of each of these cells was a little white grub; a very young bee, of[Pg 224] course, only one or two or three or four days out from the egg. Several days before (it takes only three days for a bee's egg to hatch) we had seen the beautiful long slender-bodied queen moving slowly about over these cells, with her little circle of attendants all moving with her with their heads always facing toward her. She would thrust her long hind body down into one of these empty cells and stand there quietly for two or three minutes. Then draw her body out and go on to another. And in the cell she had just left we could see plainly a tiny seed-like white speck stuck to the bottom of the cell. It was an egg of course. That is nearly all the queen does; she simply goes about all through the spring and summer laying eggs, one at a time, in the nursery or brood-cells. There is one other thing she does, or really several things, at the time of the appearance or the birth of a new queen. But that will come later. [Pg 225] We do seem to have trouble keeping to Fuzzy and her life, don't we? Well, when Mary saw Fuzzy sticking her head down into the cells with the bee-grubs in, she knew at once what Fuzzy was doing. For it was plain that the young bees had to have something to eat and it was plain, too, that they couldn't get it for themselves, for they have no legs, and can't even crawl out of their cells. Fuzzy was feeding them. She would drink a lot of honey from a honey-cell, and eat a lot of pollen from a pollen-filled cell, and then make in her mouth or front stomach (for bees have two stomachs, one in front of the other), or in certain glands in her head (it doesn't seem to be exactly known which), a very rich sort of food called bee-jelly. Then she sticks the tip of her long tongue into the mouth of the helpless, soft-bodied little white bee-grub and pours the food into it. After the bee-grub is two or three days old, the nurse bees[Pg 226]—and that is what Fuzzy could be called now—feed the babies some honey and pollen in addition to this made-up bee-jelly, unless the baby is to be a queen bee, and then it gets only the rich bee-jelly all the time. Mary thought Fuzzy should have a neat cap and white apron on and drew a clever little picture of Fuzzy as a nurse. But we are being very careful in this book not to fool anybody, and if we should print the picture Mary drew, some people would be stupid enough to think that we meant them to believe that the nurse bees wear uniforms! We say right now that they don't, and that you can't tell them from the other bees except that most of them are the younger or newly issued bees and hence haven't lost any of their hair, and so look "fuzzier" than the other bees in the hive. For just as with Fuzzy, so with the other younger bees; they stay in the hive for a week or more and act as nurses. [Pg 227] When they once are allowed to go out, and begin bringing in pollen and honey, however, then the new bees are ready to do any of the many other things that have to be done inside the hive. One day Mary saw Fuzzy standing quite still on the floor of the house, with her head pointed away from the door and held rather low, while her body was tilted up at an angle. She just stood there immovable and apparently doing nothing at all. Suddenly Mary called out: "Why, what has happened to Fuzzy? Her wings are gone!" I hurried to look. And it did seem, for a minute, as if Mary were right. Which would have been a most surprising and also a most terrible thing. But my eyes seemed to see a sort of blur or haze just over Fuzzy's back, and I bade Mary look close at this blur with her sharp eyes. And Mary solved the mystery. "She is fanning her wings so fast that you can't see them," cried Mary. "And[Pg 228] here is another bee about two inches in front of Fuzzy doing the same thing; and another," called out Mary, who was greatly excited. And it rather did seem as if these bees had gone crazy, or were having a very strange game, or something. Until I made Mary remember what would happen to us if not just three or four or five or six of us, but many thousand—indeed in Fuzzy's house there are more than ten thousand—were shut up in one house with but a single small opening to let fresh air in and bad air out. For bees breathe just as we do, that is, take fresh air into their bodies and give out poisonous air. And then Mary understood. Fuzzy and the other bees fanning their wings so fast and steadily were ventilating the house! They were making air-currents that would carry the poisonous air, laden with carbonic-acid gas, out of the door, and then fresh air would come in to replace it. And another time Fuzzy kept Mary[Pg 229] guessing a little while about what she was doing. We had looked all through the crowds of nurses and wax-makers and comb-builders and house-cleaners without finding Fuzzy. And we decided she was out on a foraging trip, when Mary caught sight of our white-spotted chum loafing about in the little glass-covered runway that leads from the outer opening into the house proper, a sort of little glass-roofed entry we have arranged so that we can see the foragers as they alight and come in, and the various other things that go on by the door. Fuzzy seemed to be loafing, but both Mary and I have seen so much of the feverish activity and the constant work of bees in the hive, and out of it for that matter, that we never expect to find a worker honey-bee really loafing. They literally work themselves to death, dying sometimes at the very door of the hive, with the heavy baskets of pollen on their thighs, the gathering and carrying of which has[Pg 230] been the killing of them. Only the bees that over-winter in the hive must have some spare moments on their hands. And here in California even these are few, for a certain amount of foraging goes on practically all the year round. But Fuzzy did seem to be loafing there in the entry. Until Mary's sharp eyes discovered her important business. She was one of the warders at the gate, a guard or sentinel told off, with one or two others, to test each arrival at the entrance. As a forager would alight and start to walk in through the entry, Fuzzy would trot up to it and feel it with her sensitive antennæ. If the newcomer were a member of the community, all right; it was passed in. But if not,—if it were one of the vicious black Germans from the other observation hive that stands close by, opening out of the same window indeed,—there would be an instant alarm and a quick attack. Two or three Italians would pounce on the intruder,[Pg 231] who would either hurry away or, if bold enough to fight, would get stung to death and pitched unceremoniously out of the entry. Or if it were a stray yellow-jacket attracted by the alluring odor of honey from the hive, one of the same things would happen. One day not a single German came, but an army, a guerrilla band intent on pillage and murder. And then there was a grand battle—but we must wait a minute for that. There were also other enemies of Fuzzy's glass house besides German bees and yellow wasps. There is a delicate little moth, bee-moth it is called, that slips into the hive at night all noiselessly and without betraying its presence to any of the bees if it can help it. And it lays, very quickly indeed, a lot of tiny round eggs in a crack somewhere. It doesn't seem to try to get out. At any rate it rarely does get out. For it almost always gets found out and stung to death and pulled and[Pg 232] torn into small pieces by the enraged bees, who seem to go almost frantic whenever they discover one of these innocent-seeming little gray-and-brown moths in the house. And well they may, for death and destruction of the community follow in the train of the bee-moth. From the eggs hatch little sixteen-footed grubs that keep well hidden in the cracks, only venturing out to feed on the wax of the comb nearest them. As they grow they need more and more wax, but they protect themselves while getting it by spinning a silken web which prevents the bees from getting at them. Wherever they go they spin silken lines and little webs until, if several bee-moths have managed to lay their eggs in the hive and several hundred of their voracious wax-eating grubs are spinning tough silken lines and webs through all the corridors and rooms of the bees' house, the household duties get so difficult to carry on that the bee community begins[Pg 233] to dwindle; the unfed young die in their cells, the indoor workers starve, and the breakdown of the whole hive occurs. Such a thing happened in this very glass house of Fuzzy's a year before we got acquainted with Fuzzy herself. And we had to get a new family of bees to come and live in the house after we had cleaned out and washed and sterilized all the cracks and corners so that no live eggs of the terrible bee-moth remained. Some days we found Fuzzy at work with several companions on more prosaic and commonplace things about the house; chores they might be called. She had to help clean house occasionally. For the bees are extremely cleanly housekeepers, with a keen eye for all fallen bits of wax, or bodies of dead bees, or any kind of dirt that might come from the housekeeping of so large a family. Every day the hive is thoroughly cleaned. If there comes a day when it is not, that is a bad sign. There[Pg 234] is something wrong with the bee community. They haven't enough food, or they are getting sick, or something else irregular and distressing is happening. Also the house has to be "calked" occasionally to keep out draughts and more particularly creeping enemies of the hive, like bee-moths and bee-lice. The cracks are pasted over with propolis, which is made from resin or gum brought in from certain trees. If something gets into the hive that can't be carried out, then the bees cover it up with propolis. If they find a bee-moth grub in a crack where they can't get to it to sting it to death, they wall it up, a living prisoner, with propolis. Once our bees kept coming in with a curious new kind of propolis; a greenish oily-looking stuff that stuck to their legs and got on their faces and bodies and wouldn't clean off. We discovered that they were trying to unpaint a near-by house as fast as it was being freshly painted! [Pg 235] Fuzzy took her turn at all these odd jobs, and though she was beginning to show here and there a few places where her luxuriant hair was rubbed off a little, she was still as lively and willing and industrious as ever. Every day we liked her more and more and wished, how many times, that we could talk with her and tell her how much we liked her, and have her tell us how she enjoyed life in the glass house. But we could only watch her and keep acquainted with all her manifold duties and hope that nothing would happen to her on her long foraging trips for pollen and nectar and propolis. Whenever Mary and I came to the glass house and couldn't find Fuzzy, we were in a sort of fever of excitement and apprehension until she came in with her great loads of white or yellow or red pollen and went to shaking and dancing and whirling about in the extraordinary way that she and her mates have while hunting for a suitable[Pg 236] pantry cell in which to unload her pollen-baskets. Sometimes she would walk and dance and whirl over almost all of the pollen-cells in the house before she would finally decide on one. Then she would stand over it and pry with the strong sharp spines on her middle legs at the solidly packed pollen loads on her hind legs, trying to loosen them so they would fall into the cell. Sometimes she simply couldn't get the pollen loads loose, and then a companion would help her. And after they were loosened and had fallen into the cell, she or a companion would ram her head down into the cell and pack and tamp the soft sticky pollen loads down into one even mass. And then how industriously she would clean herself, drawing her antennæ through the neat little antennæ combs on her front legs, and licking herself with her long flexible tongue, or getting licked by her mates all over. Perhaps as she was washing herself after[Pg 237] a hard foraging trip, the stately and graceful queen of the house would come walking slowly by, looking for empty cells in which to lay eggs. Then Fuzzy would turn around, head toward the queen, and form part of the little circle of honor that always kept forming and re-forming around the queen mother. For the honey-bee queen is the mother of all the great family, and her relation to the community is really the mother relation rather than that of a reigning queen. She does not order the bees; indeed, the worker bees seem to order her. They determine what cells she may have to lay eggs in and when she shall be superseded by a new queen. And when they decide for a new queen, they immediately set to work in a very interesting way to make one. This is the way, as Mary and I saw it through the glass sides of Fuzzy's house. First, a little group of workers went to work tearing down, apparently, some comb[Pg 238] already made; that is, they began on the lower edge of a brood-comb, in the cells of which the old queen had just laid eggs, to tear out the partitions between two or three of the cells. What became of the eggs we couldn't tell, for they are very small, and the bees were so crowded together that we could see only the general results of their activity. Soon it was evident that they were building as well as tearing down, and a new cell, much larger than the usual kind and quite different in shape, began to take form. It was like a thimble, only longer and slenderer, and it had the wide end closed and the narrower tapering end open. They worked excitedly and rapidly, and the new cell steadily grew in length. Never was it left alone for a minute. Always there were bees coming and going and always some clustered about. It was a constant center of interest and excitement. Mary and I knew of course that this was[Pg 239] a queen cell, and that at its base there was one of the eggs laid by the old queen in a worker cell. This egg hatched, we knew, in a few days, although we could not see the little grub, but nurse bees were about constantly besides the cell-builders, and all the bees that came to the wonderful new cell seemed to realize that a very important, if at present rather grubby and wholly helpless, personage was in it. The cell finally got to be more than an inch long, and at the end of five days it was capped. A lot of milky bee-jelly had been stored in it before capping. After this nothing happened for seven days. Mary was in the room where the glass bee-houses are, and I was in an adjoining room, with the door between the two open. As I sat peering through my big microscope, I seemed to hear a curious unusual sound from the bee-room, a sort of piping rather high-pitched but muffled. Perhaps it was Mary trying a new song.[Pg 240] She has a good assortment of noises. But now came another sound; lower-pitched but louder than the other; a trumpet-call, only of course not as loud as the soldiers' trumpets or the ones on the stage when the King is about to come in. Then the shrill piping again; and again the trumpet answer. And finally a third and new sound, but this last unmistakably a Mary sound. And with it came the dear girl herself, with her hair standing on—well, no, I cannot truthfully say standing on end, but trying to. And her eyes shooting sparks and her mouth open and her hands up. "The bees," she gasped, "the bees are doing it!" There was no doubt of what "it" meant. It was this sounding of pipes and trumpets; these battle calls. I leaped to my feet; that is, if an elderly professor, who has certain twinges in his joints occasionally, can really leap. Anyway I knocked over my chair—and precious[Pg 241] near my microscope—in getting up, and started for the bees. And that shows the high degree of my excitement. But never before in all the years I had played with bees had I heard the trumpet challenges of queen bees to the death duel. Inside the cell was the new queen shut up in darkness, but ready and eager to come out, and piping her challenge. And outside, brave and fearless, if old and worn, was the mother queen trumpeting back her defiance. It was the spirit of the Amazons. And what excitement in the hive! Simply frantic were the thousands of workers. We watched them racing about wildly; up, down, across, back; but mostly clustering in the bottom near the queen cell. And working industriously at the cell itself, a group of builders, strengthening and thickening the cell's walls especially at the closed lower end. They seemed to be, yes, they were, preventing the new queen inside from coming out. She was probably[Pg 242] gnawing away with her trowel-like jaws at the soft wax from the inside, while they were putting on more wax and keeping her a prisoner. This went on for two or three days. The piping and trumpeting kept up intermittently, and the thickening of the cell constantly. Until the time came! And now I am going to disappoint you dreadfully. But much less than Mary and I were disappointed. We were not there when the time came! The bees were excited, I have said. Mary and I were excited, I have said. The bees put in all their time being excited and watching the queen cell. We put in most of ours. But we had to eat and we had to sleep. The bees didn't seem to. And so we missed the coming out. What a pity! How unfair to us! And to you. As there is by immemorial honey-bee tradition but one queen in a community at one time, when new queens issue from[Pg 243] the great cells, something has to happen. This may be one of three things: either the old and new queens battle to death, and it is believed that in such battles only does a queen bee ever use her sting, or the workers interfere and kill either the old or new queen by "balling" her (gathering in a tight suffocating mass about her), or either the old (usually old) or new queen leaves the hive with a swarm, and a new community is founded. In Fuzzy's community this last thing happened when the new queen came out. Mary and I were on hand very early the morning of the third day after the piping and trumpeting had begun. As we jerked the black cloth jacket off the hive to see how things were, we were astonished at the new excitement that was apparent in the hive; the bees seemed to be in a perfect frenzy and had suspended all other operations except racing about in apparent utter dementia. We could find neither[Pg 244] the old queen nor the new queen in the seething mass, nor could we even see whether the queen cell was open or still sealed up. Another curious thing was that the taking off of the black cloth jacket seemed to affect the bees very strongly. They had suddenly become very sensitive to light, and while, when the jacket was on, they all seemed to be making towards the bottom and especially towards the exit corner, which was the lower corner next to the window, as soon as we lifted off the jacket they seemed all to rush up to the top where the light was strongest. So nearly simultaneous and uniform were the turning and rushing up that the whole mass of bees seemed to flow like some thick mottled liquid. It was evident that all this was the excitement and frenzy of swarming. And it was also evident that the bees, in their great excitement, were finding their way[Pg 245] to the outlet by the light that came in through it. And when we removed the cloth jacket we confused them because the light now came into the hive from both sides and was especially strong at the top, which was nearest the greatest expanse of the outer window. So we finally let the jacket stay on, and after a considerable time of violent exertion, the bees began to issue pell-mell from the door of the house. The first comers waited for the others, and there was pretty soon formed a great mass of excited bees around the doorway, and clustered on the stone window-sill just outside. Then suddenly the whole mass took wing and flew away together. And pretty soon all was quiet in the hive. Mary and I had been nearly as excited as the bees, and we were glad to sit and rest a little and get breath again. Soon it was luncheon time and we went off to Mary's house without looking into the hive. We had had just about all the bee[Pg 246] observing we needed for one forenoon. But almost the first thing that Mary did at the table was to straighten up suddenly and cry out, "I wonder if Fuzzy swarmed!" And thereafter that was all we thought of, and we made a very hasty meal of it. And the moment we got up we hurried back to Fuzzy's home and jerked off the black jacket. How quiet everything was inside. And how lessened the number of bees. Fully one-third of the community must have gone out. We set to work looking carefully at all the remaining bees. It was only a minute or two before Mary clapped her hands and cried, "She's here!" "She" was Fuzzy, of course. And we were both very glad that Fuzzy had not deserted the glass house—and us. Some one came in and said that a "lot of your bees are out here hanging on to a bush." But we had seen "swarms" before, and were much more interested[Pg 247] in finding out what the bees do inside after a swarm has gone off than in watching the swarm outside. We knew that "scouts" would fly away soon from the great hanging bunch or swarm to look for a suitable new home; a hollow tree, a deserted hive, a box in hedge corner, any place protected and dark, and when they had found one, they would come back, and soon the whole swarm would fly off to the new house. Once one of our swarms started down a chimney of a neighbor's house, and immensely surprised the good people by coming out, with a great buzzing, into the fireplace! And another swarm, not finding a suitable indoors place, simply began to build new combs hanging down from the branch of a cypress-tree in the Arboretum, and really made an outdoor home there, carrying on all the work of a bee-community for months. But usually a bee-swarm gets found by some bee-keeper and put into an empty hive.[Pg 248] And that is what happened to our deserters. After Mary had found Fuzzy, who seemed to have lost considerable hair and to have got pretty well rubbed in the grand melée, she continued to peer carefully through the glass side of the hive. And I looked carefully too. Of course we wanted to find out about the queens. Was there any queen left in our hive? We knew there must be a queen with the swarm; bees don't go off without a queen. So if the old and new queen had fought and one had been killed, or if the workers had "balled" the new queen when she came out, there could be no queen left in the hive. Of course this would not be very serious. For there were many eggs and also many just-hatched bee-grubs in the brood-combs, and the workers could easily make a new queen. But this wasn't necessary, for we soon found a graceful, slender-bodied bee, but so fresh and brightly colored and clean[Pg 249] that we knew her to be the new queen and not the old. Things were perfectly normal and quiet. Some foragers were coming and going; house-cleaners were busily at work on the floor of the house, and nurses were moving about over the brood-cells. Not a trace of the wild frenzy of the forenoon. What a puzzling thing it is to see all the signs of tremendous mental excitement in other animals and yet not to be able to understand in the least their real condition! They may seem to do things for reasons and impulses that lead us to do things, but we can't be at all sure that their mental or nervous processes, their impulses and stimuli, are those which control us. We can't possibly put ourselves in their places. For we are made differently. And therefore it is plainly foolish to try to interpret the behavior of the lower animals on a basis of our understanding of our own behavior. Insects may see colors we cannot[Pg 250] see; may hear sounds we cannot hear; smell odors too delicate for us to smell. In fact, from our observations and experiments, we are sure they do all these things. The world to them, then, is different from the world to us. And their behavior is based on their appreciation by their senses in their own way of this different world. What determines which queen shall leave the hive with the swarm? What determines which five thousand out of fifteen thousand worker bees, all apparently similarly stimulated and excited, shall swarm out, and which ten thousand shall stay in? These are questions too hard for us to answer. We may take refuge in Maeterlinck's poetical conception of the "spirit of the hive." Let us say that the "spirit of the hive" decides these things. As well as what workers shall forage and what ones clean house; what bees shall ventilate and what make wax and build comb.[Pg 251] Which is simply to say that we don't know what decides all these things. The reduction in numbers of the inmates of Fuzzy's house made it much easier to follow closely the behavior of any one bee, or any special group of bees doing some one thing. And both Mary and I had long wanted to see as clearly as possible just what goes on when the bees are making wax and building comb. We had often examined, on the bodies of dead bees, the four pairs of five-sided wax-plates on the under side of the hind body. We knew that the wax comes out of skin-glands under these plates as a liquid, and oozes through the pores of the plates, spreading out and hardening in thin sheets on the outside of the plates. To produce the wax certain workers eat a large amount of honey, and then mass together in a curtain or festoon hanging down from the ceiling of the hive or frame. Here they increase the temperature of their bodies[Pg 252] by some strong internal exertion; and after several hours or sometimes two or three days, the fine glistening wax-sheets appear on the wax-plates. These sheets get larger and larger until they project beyond the edges of the body, when they either fall off or are plucked off by other workers. It was only two or three days after the excitement of the swarming out that Mary and I saw one of these curtains or hanging festoons of bees making wax, and you may be sure we tried to watch it closely. The bees hung to each other by their legs and kept quite still. The curtain hung down fully six inches from the ceiling of the house, and the first or upper row of bees had therefore to sustain the hanging weight of all those below. And there were certainly several hundred bees in the curtain. The wax-scales began to appear on the second day. And many of them fell off and down to the floor of the house. Some of the scales were plucked off by[Pg 253] other workers and carried in their mouths to where a new comb had been started before the swarming, and either used by themselves to help in the comb-building or given to comb-builders already at work. Some of the scales were plucked off by the wax-making workers themselves, who then left the curtain and carried the wax-scales to the seat of the comb-building operations. Various other workers picked up from the floor the fallen scales and carried them to the comb-builders. These building bees would chew up pieces of wax in their mouths, mixing it with saliva, and then would press and mould it with their little trowel-like jaws against the comb, so as to build up steadily the familiar six-sided cells. Each layer of comb is composed of a double tier or layer of these cells, a common partition or base serving as bottom of each tier. The cells to be used for brood are of two sizes, smaller ones for workers[Pg 254] to be reared in, and larger ones for the drones. Sometimes the queen lays drone eggs in worker cells and then the cells have to be built up higher when the drone-grub gets too large for its cell. Sometimes, too, the worker bees lay eggs—this happens often in a hive bereft by some accident of its queen—but these eggs can only hatch into drones. Occasionally the workers make a mistake and build a queen cell around a drone egg. This happened once in our hive when there were no queen-laid eggs in the brood-cells, and some workers had laid eggs. The workers tried to make a new queen out of one of these eggs, but of course only a worthless drone came out of the queen cell. In building comb and cells for storing honey, new wax is almost exclusively used, but for brood-comb old wax and wax mixed with pollen may be used. Any comb or part of a comb not needed may be torn down and the wax used to build new comb or to cap cells with. [Pg 255] I have said that the nearest neighbors of Fuzzy's family are a lot of black German bees, housed in a larger house than Fuzzy's, but one also with glass sides so that we can see what goes on inside. The door of the house opens through the same large window as that of Fuzzy's house, but the foragers coming back from their long trips rarely make a mistake in the doors, the Germans coming to their door and the Italians to theirs. The German community is much the larger, there being probably thirty or forty thousand workers in it, although of course only one queen, and only a few hundred drones. Sometimes the foragers, both Germans and Italians, make the mistake of coming to the wrong window of the room in which their houses are. There are five large windows all alike in the west wall of this room, and often we find our bees bumping against the other windows, especially the ones just next to the right one. They can't, of[Pg 256] course, see in through these windows because the room is much darker than outside, and so all that the home-coming bees can see as they approach the building is a row of similar windows separated from each other by similar spaces of buffy stone. And keen as our bees are in finding their way straight to their hives from distant flower-fields, this repetition of similar windows seems to confuse some of them. But what I started to tell about is something that happened between the neighboring bee-houses quite different from the troubles of the bees finding their way home. It was something that gave Mary and me the principal excitement that we had in all our many days of watching bees. Mary and I do not want to say that the German bees knew that a third of Fuzzy's community had swarmed out and gone away. Though how they could help knowing it really seems more a puzzle, for there[Pg 257] was excitement and buzzing and window-sill covered and air full of bees enough to have told everybody within a rod of what was going on in the Italian house. But it was true that Fuzzy's community had never been troubled at all seriously by the belligerent Germans, until after it had been much reduced in strength by the loss of one-third of its members. And then this trouble did come, and came soon. So it looks as if the Germans realized the weakness of their neighbors. But perhaps not. Just as our other exciting time beginning with the piping of the new queen and lasting until the subsequent swarming was a discovery of Mary's, so with this new time of high excitement; high excitement I may say both on our part and the bees'. Mary was in the room where the bees are, although not at the moment watching them, when she heard a sound of violent buzzing and humming. It grew quickly[Pg 258] louder and shriller, and in a moment both communities were in an uproar. It was a battle, a great battle. On the one hand, a struggle by brutal invaders intent on sacking the home and pillaging the stores of a community given to ways of peace and just now reduced in numbers by a migration or exodus from home of a large group of restless spirits; on the other hand, a struggle for home and property and the lives of hundreds of babies by this weak and presumably timid and unwarlike people. A great band of Germans were at the door of Fuzzy's house trying to get in! They buzzed and pushed and ran their stings in and out of their bodies, and crowded the entryway full. But the Italian workers and guards had roused their community, and pouring out from the hive into the narrow entry was a stream of angry and brave amber bees, ready to fight to the death for their home. It was really a terrific struggle. The[Pg 259] Italians, few in numbers as a community, were yet enough to oppose on fairly equal terms the band of Germans, for by no means all the Germans had come from their house. And the Italians had the great advantage of being defenders. They had only to keep out the black column trying to force its way in through the narrow door and entry. And they were no laggards in battle. They fought with perfect courage and great energy. Often a small group of Italians would force its way out of the door and into the very midst of the Germans outside on the window-sill. These brave bees were all killed, overwhelmed by the superior numbers of the enemy. But not until they had left many dying Germans on the stone window-ledge were their own paralyzed and dying bodies hustled out of the way. In many cases the combat took on the character of duels between single pairs of combatants. A German and an Italian[Pg 260] would clasp each other with jaws and legs, and thus interlocked and whirling over and over with violent beating of their wings would stab at each other until one or both were mortally wounded. All the time the frenzied ball would be rolling nearer and nearer the outer edge of the treacherous sloping window-ledge, until finally over it would go, whirling in the air through the thirty feet of fall to the ground below. Here the struggle would go on, if the fighters were not too stunned by the fall, until one or both bees were dead or paralyzed. It is really too painful to tell of this fight. And it was painful to watch. But the end came soon. And it was a glorious victory for Fuzzy and her companions. The German robbers flew back, what were left of them, to their own hive. Mary and I tried all through the fight to watch Fuzzy. But we saw her only once; she was in the entry then and nearly in the front row of[Pg 261] fighters. We were glad to see her so brave, but fearful for her fate. After the fight we looked anxiously through the hive for our little white-spotted friend. We didn't see her, and were ready to mourn her for lost, when Mary happened to look out on the window-ledge where a few Italians were pushing the remaining paralyzed or dead Germans off. There was Fuzzy dragging, with much effort, a dead, black bee along the rough stone. We were very happy, then, and wanted more than ever to be able to talk to our brave little champion and rejoice with her over the splendid victory. But we could only do as Fuzzy seemed to be doing. That is, take up again the work that lay at our hands. My work was to go into the lecture-room and talk to a class about the absence of intelligence and mind and spirit in the lower animals and the dependence of their behavior upon physics and chemistry and mechanics! Mary's[Pg 262] work was to go out into the poppy-field and talk with the little grass people whom she never sees or hears, but knows are there. <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/i031.jpg" width-obs="300" height-obs="290" alt="" /></div> <hr class="chap" /> <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/i032.jpg" width-obs="400" height-obs="240" alt="" /></div> <hr class="chap" /> [Pg 265] <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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