Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 3.djvu/512

496 Successive swarms are sent off as long as the increase of population permits ; and the number thus produced in a season depends on a variety of circumstances, such as the abundance of flowers, the warmth of the climite, and capacity of the hive. Bosc, while he was French consul in Carolina, found a stock of bees in the woods which had been robbed of its wax and honey by the negroes ; he con trived to convey the bees in his hat to a hive in his garden. He obtained from this hive eleven swarms before the end of autumn ; and these, again, gave him the same number of secondary swarms, so that by the end of the year he had twenty-two hives stocked from the one he had thus saved from destruction. In Britain a hive commonly sends off only two and sometimes three swarms in the course of the summer ; and prudent apiarians will be satisfied with one swarm only, returning all subsequent ones to the parent hive, which would otherwise become very weak. When bar-frame hives are used, the issue of after-swarms is easily and surely prevented by destroying all queen-cells but one after the issue of the first swarm.

Very few drones accompany the new colonies, so that almost all those produced in the spring remain in the hive. But when the queens are impregnated, and no new swarms are about to take place, the workers, who had till then suffered them to live unmolested in the hive, are on a sudden seized with a deadly fury towards them, and a scene of carnage ensues. This usually happens in June, July, or August. They chase their unhappy victims in every quarter, till they seek a refuge at the bottom of the hive, where they collect in crowds, and are indiscriminately, and without a single exception, massacred by the working bees, who, with implacable fury, bite, maim, and throw them out of the hive. So great is their antipathy to all the race of drones, that they destroy, at the same time, the male eggs and larvae, and tear open the cocoons of their pupae, in order to devote them to one common destruction. This sacrifice of the males is not, however, the effect of a blind and indiscriminating instinct ; for if a hive be deprived of its queen, the massacre does not take place, while the hottest persecution rages in all the surrounding hives. In this case the males are allowed to survive the winter.

Having thus got rid of the useless mouths which consumed, without any advantage to the public, a large portion of their provisions, the bees spend the remainder of the summer in collecting stores of honey and of pollen for the ensuing winter. Their gleanings are now less abundant than in the spring, and require more labour in the search and collection. But at this season the leaves of many kinds of trees, which are covered in the morning with a saccha rine fluid that exudes from them, furnish them with a species of nourishment, which, though of very inferior quality to the nectarial fluid, still contributes to their support. Fruit is also attacked by bees, after the cuticular covering has been broken through by birds or snails. They also find nutriment in the hvnfy-dew, which is an excrementitious fluid deposited on the leaves of plants by certain species of aphides. Often, however, these resources utual tie- fail, and the hive is threatened with famine. On these edations. occasions the distressed bees frequently betake themselves to plunder ; and if a weak or queenless hive can be dis covered they begin a furious onset, which costs great numbers their lives. If the invaders should fail in their attempt to force the entrance they retreat, and are not pursued by those whom they have assailed ; but if they succeed in making good the assault, the war continues to rage in the interior of the hive until one side finds itself beaten, in which case, should the conquerors be the invaders, the invaded will generally join their forces, and help their late enemies to carry of their plunder, and at once become members of the lately hostile hive.

The life of a queen-bee will sometimes extend to three or four years, but her fertility decreases after her second breeding season. When absent from the hive on her matrimonial excursions she very often becomes a prey to a bird, and not seldom on her return mistakes her hive, when she is probably killed by the stranger bees, or by the queen on whose territory she has intruded. Drones seldom die a natural death ; there is no evidence of the duration of the lives of individuals, but normally they are hatched about May and slaughtered by the workers in June, July, or August ; should the hive be queenless, however, the workers do not harm the drones, and some will then live far into the, inter or even to the following spring. The life of a worker is greatly dependent on the season of the year and the amount of labour performed. The modern method of introducing a fertile Ligurian queen (Apis ligustica) into a queenless stock of the common black bee (Apis mellifica], in order to obtain pure stocks of the former variety, has plainly demonstrated the short life of the worker bee. If the Ligurian queen be introduced in May, when bees are busy and work abundant, in from six to eight weeks thereafter scarcely a black bee will be found in the hive, although at the time of the introduction multitudes of young larva? were present, which probably would not all be fully deve loped for nearly three weeks ; therefore, in the season of hardest work, the inhabitants of the hive would seldom attain the age of six weeks. But if the experiment of the queen s introduction be deferred until October, then not until the following May will the black bees have become extinct. And it is a curious fact that if a hive be deprived of its queen in October (and none other supplied), then the workers, having no labour to perform either in replen ishing stores or attending on the larva?, will possibly in May be found still living, although somewhat reduced in numbers. Such a colony, however, generally becomes a victim to robbers when the activity of spring arrives, for a queenless stock rarely makes much defence of its stores. In fine winter days, when the sun shines brightly, numbers of bees are tempted abroad, which easily become benumbed by cold, fall to the ground, and die. Insectivorous birds also make victims of great numbers at such times, other insect food being scarce ; so that, probably, in winter and early spring, more workers die from accident than by natural decay. The fecundity of the queen-bee is, however, adequate not only to repair these losses, but to multiply the population in a very high progression. Apis liyustica has the reputation of being more prolific than A. mellifica ; and a young and vigorous queen will, in the fine weather of a warm May and June, deposit as many as 2000 eggs per day for several weeks in succession, and this fertility is of much longer continuance in America and other warm climates than in England. In England, eggs are deposited and young reared ten or eleven months in the year, when the colony is strong in numbers and well supplied with stores ; but the increase in the cold months seldom equals the decrease by deaths.|1}}

The loss of the queen is an event which has the most marked influence on the conduct of the workers. Although the queen is constantly an object of attention and of affection to the whole community, they are not immediately sensible of her absence when she is removed from the hive. The ordinary labours are continued without interruption, and it is not till a whole hour has elapsed that symptoms of uneasiness are manifested, and it is even then only partially displayed. The inquietude begins in one part of the hive, the workers become restless, abandon the young which they were feeding, run to and fro, and, by striking each other with their antenna;, communicate the alarming intelligence very quickly to their companions. The ferment soon extends to the whole community ; the bees rush 