Book of Monsters Part 17

While the bee is gathering pollen with her legs, she is also gathering nectar with her tongue and storing it in a special honey stomach from which she later regurgitates it into the honey cells in her nest.

The nectar, when it is gathered, is thin, like the sap of the maple tree, and, like it, must be condensed. Part of the water seems to be taken out in the honey stomach, and part evaporates from the honey cell.

It will, perhaps, be a satisfaction to those who hate getting up early to know that there is a well-founded rumor that some b.u.mble-bees have a trumpeter who, somewhere between three and four o'clock in the morning, wakes up the sleepy hive.

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THE POLLEN PLATES OF THE b.u.mBLE-BEE

(_Bombus americanorum_, Fab.)

If you will watch a b.u.mble-bee closely as she crawls over the stamens of a wild rose, perhaps you can see that, although she covers the whole under part of her body with pollen, yet she sc.r.a.pes off all she can with her feet and packs it in a yellow ma.s.s on the smooth, hairless segments of her large hind legs, the pollen plates as they are called. To make the pollen stick on these smooth plates and hang together during the flight to the nest, it is claimed by Muller that the bee mixes nectar with the pollen grains. The kind of pollen that she gathers is, however, not generally the dusty kind, like the pollen of the pines or gra.s.ses, but the sticky kind that comes from insect-fertilized flowers. When the b.u.mble-bee reaches her nest, she sc.r.a.pes the pollen from the pollen basket and with it feeds the young, for pollen is the solid food of baby bees.

There is one strange thing about these smooth pollen plate legs which, from our human, individualistic point of view, is hard to understand. It is only the workers, the undeveloped females, which have them; the legs of the males and of the queens are hairy and are not at all adapted for pollen gathering. Thus, since workers bear no children, we see a race of parents transmitting to certain of their offspring characters which neither they nor any of their ancestors have ever possessed.

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THE b.u.mBLE-BEE AT WORK

This photograph shows the great hybridizer at work.

She is on one of the single roses, her hairy body spread over the stamens which, with their yellow anthers, look like a circular bed of tulips. In the middle of the circle, where her right foot rests, is the stigma.

If you will sometime take a hand lens and watch a bee at work (and if you don't get too close she will pay no attention to you), you will notice the clumsy way she crawls about, knocking the pollen off the stamens and getting her body covered with the yellow dust. As you watch, any feeling of there being some mystery about cross fertilization will be dispelled.

How this same b.u.mble-bee could crawl across another rose blossom _without_ leaving a trail of yellow pollen on its stigma would be the mystery!

Since the earliest days of the world of plants and insects, the b.u.mble-bee and her ancestors have been at work mixing the pollen on hundreds of different plants and playing, doubtless, a perfectly gigantic role in the creation of the flowering plants which now cover vast areas of the globe.

It is perhaps an idle speculation, but it would be interesting to know how many plants would become extinct were some disease or parasite to exterminate the bees.

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THE TELLTALE MILKWEED POLLEN

(_Bombus sp._)

Although this b.u.mble-bee was caught in flight across my meadow, her photograph shows beyond the shadow of a doubt that she had been a recent visitor to the blossom of some milkweed, for, projecting from her right hind leg and plainly visible, are the pollen ma.s.ses of the milkweed flower. They look like little paddles and hang in pairs, although this you cannot see in the picture.

We know that flowers depend upon the bees to fertilize them, but somehow I do not think we grasp the completeness of this dependence, nor realize how many flowers there are which, unless they have their own pet insect visitors, would soon become extinct.

The milkweed lures its visitor with little cups of nectar, and beside each cup it sets a trap which is as carefully worked out as the steel traps which the modern trappers use. Across the top of a little slit, wide below and narrow above, lie the small ends of the paddles or pollen ma.s.ses, firmly joined together. As the bee alights to sup the nectar, her foot slips into this crack, and in trying to extricate it she pulls up the pair of paddles which fasten themselves onto a hair of her leg like a clothespin on a line. In drying, the paddles clap together in such a way that by the time another milkweed flower is visited they can slip with the leg right into the little slit and are broken off and left there as the bee again pulls out her leg. Once inside, these pollen grains throw out a score or more of tiny, rootlike tubes which grow into the lining of the slit and carry to the ovary below the fertilizing germ plasm which makes the seed develop.

The b.u.mble-bee, of course, is strong enough to slip into these traps and pull her legs out as a routine thing, but many small moths and b.u.t.terflies are not, and these get caught and die upon the blossoms.

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THE POOR MALE b.u.mBLE-BEE

(_Bombus americanorum_, Fab.)

It was late in October before I noticed, flying low here and there across the clover tops, large b.u.mble-bees, which seemed to be more covered with golden hairs than those which I had watched throughout the summer time. At first I thought them queens, but as their number multiplied I felt I must be mistaken, and one of my insect-knowing friends explained that they were only males, and that with the approaching days of winter they were all doomed to death. Already, he pointed out, their wings were battered and frayed from flying against the autumn winds.

The importance of the males! Could there be a weaker argument against woman's suffrage than the one which has been brought forward that throughout nature the duty and the right of protection rests with the male? Perhaps the drones do fight among themselves; but, as in most other fighting of the males, it is not to protect the nest or young from peris.h.i.+ng, but merely to determine which one of them shall win the queen's attention. The males are stingless.

In this world of the clover field all the work of the society is done by the queen herself, or by the workers, which are infertile females.

Apparently few males are wanted in the colony until late in the season, when, for a brief period, they are tolerated in considerable numbers as the necessary courtiers who accompany the young queens of late summer in their marriage flight. This takes place before the winter comes to kill all but a few fortunate queens, which find safe shelter in some crevice in the rocks or underneath some old, decaying log.

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SOLITARY LEAF-CUTTING BEE

(_Megachile brevis_, Say)

Unlike the social honey and b.u.mble-bees, this bee leads a solitary life.

With her strong, saw-like jaws, the female makes her burrow in soft wood and lines it with bits of leaf which she has cut from some plant. When the leaves of plants in the garden have large round holes in them, in nine cases out of ten you may be sure that they have been cut by some solitary bee.

When the burrow is complete she makes a ball of pollen and nectar, puts it in the bottom of the burrow, lays an egg upon it, and, with a wad of leaves, securely shuts it in; over this she lays down another food ball with its corresponding egg, and so on, until the burrow is full.

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THE STINGER OF THE LEAF-CUTTING BEE

(_Megachile brevis_, Say)

The sting or "stinger" of a bee is indeed a most wonderful piece of mechanism. At the base, inside the body of the bee, lie bars or levers, operated by muscles, which push the darts out and draw them in. The poison sac lies just behind this mechanism and pours the poison into a set of cup-like valves, from which it escapes into the wound along longitudinal grooves in the sting like grease along the piston of an engine.

The sting itself is not, then, hollow, like the spider's poison fang, but is a poisoned stiletto as long as the bee's foreleg which she can thrust in and out with incredible rapidity, and which, as everyone knows, can inflict a painful wound on creatures millions of times her size.

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A COMMON RED ANT

(_Formica sp._)

Ants are undoubtedly the highest, structurally and mechanically, of all insects, and at the same time the most efficient. Their social organization has been the admiration of human beings from the earliest times, because the interest of the individual is merged so completely into that of the colony; but, as Wheeler remarks, their organization must strike the individualist with horror.

It is an organization of females, too. The workers are females, the soldiers are females, the nurses are females, and there is one queen mother for them all, who lays all the eggs of the colony. Where are the males, those representatives of society, those voters of our human colonies? They do not exist as such, for the males of ant colonies are but mates for the young queens. Together with them they leave the nest on their marriage day and together make the marriage flight, but as soon as this is over they die, and the colony gets on easily without them.

To man, who is the most rapidly evolving organism on the earth today, it is a strange thought that the most highly developed insect which the world has produced, and which has not changed materially since the Tertiary epoch, has relegated the males to the short-lived function of reproduction, leaving him no work to perform and getting rid of him as quickly as possible. Why did the ants, with their marvelous instincts, fail to conquer the world? Why have they stood still for thousands of years after they had perfected their social organization? Did they go as far as evolution could go when it leaves the male out of account? It is perhaps a comfort to think that, after all, they have failed and the man-guided organization of human beings has surpa.s.sed them in its development!