Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/174

170 the hive tidy by carrying out the bits of wax that have dropped to the floor, or line with propolis the slight cracks between the warping boards. Others again seal over such honey as has been properly ripened, while everywhere through the hive are groups of drones, "sitting idle at the banquets of another."

These things he could never see; for him to view the life of the swarm while it was being lived was impossible. He might, by tearing it to pieces, see where and perhaps how it had been, but to do so he must use such violence as to cause a temporary if not a lasting cessation of the functions of the swarm. Yet in spite of the disadvantages under which he labored, a fairly large proportion of the theories which he advances are borne out by the knowledge of to-day. We could, as is only to be expected, set him right about numerous facts in the life of the bee, but of its general habits we could teach him but little, and of its temperament even less.

It is natural, indeed, that his reading of the nature of the bee should more nearly approximate our own, than that his theories as to the facts of its life and the most successful methods of treating it, should tally with those of the present day. For the character of the bee, to all practical purposes, is the same to-day that it has always been; neither new crosses in breeding nor the accumulative gentling effect of centuries of cultivation seems to have modified its disposition, which is to be learned now, as always, by personal observation. The main facts of its life, on the other hand, and consequently the most rational and therefore the most successful methods of treatment, have been very definitely determined by modern scientific investigation.

We know, for instance, as Swammerdam discovered with the aid of his microscope in the seventeenth century, that the "king bee" is not a king, as Virgil believed, but a queen, the only perfect female of the swarm, who gives birth to a constant stream of workers and drones, which keeps the swarm undiminished though the old bees are dying off continually. We know too that the life of the individual bee, far from being "seldom prolonged beyond the seventh summer," as Virgil thought, is often exhausted by hard work during the honey-flow in six or eight weeks, and probably seldom lasts longer, even under favorable circumstances, than six or eight months, the queen being the single exception to this rule. She sometimes lives three or four years, but is seldom sufficiently prolific to keep up the strength of the swarm properly after her second or third year.

Virgil's theory that two colonies often came forth to battle with each other is erroneous; he must have seen two swarms that happened to leave their hives simultaneously and mingled in the air, as not infrequently happens in the height of the swarming season. He may have chanced to see the queens of the two swarms fighting, a by no means