Insect Stories Part 9

"Come, Mary, we're off. How would you like to be a May-fly?"

"And have only one day to live when I'm all grown up?"

"You might be saved some troubles, Mary."

[Ill.u.s.tration: IN FUZZY'S GLa.s.s HOUSE]

IN FUZZY'S GLa.s.s HOUSE

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 gla.s.s house at the very time that 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. 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.

Indeed we had planned Fuzzy's gla.s.s 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 in closed cells, and perhaps a few other things, one doesn't learn much by peering into a hive through a ma.s.s 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 gla.s.s-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 s.h.i.+ning in through the great window-like sides 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 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 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?"

"Not the least in the world," I hasten to answer rea.s.suringly. "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 gla.s.s-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 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 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 ma.s.ses 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 gla.s.s house. Not 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 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.

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--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 ap.r.o.n 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.

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 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 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 gla.s.s-covered runway that leads from the outer opening into the house proper, a sort of little gla.s.s-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 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 antennae. If the newcomer were a member of the community, all right; it was pa.s.sed 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, 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 gla.s.s 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 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 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 gla.s.s 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; ch.o.r.es 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 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!

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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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 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 ma.s.s. And then how industriously she would clean herself, drawing her antennae through the neat little antennae 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 was.h.i.+ng herself after 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 gla.s.s sides of Fuzzy's house. First, a little group of workers went to work tearing down, apparently, some comb 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 part.i.tions 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 cl.u.s.tered about. It was a constant center of interest and excitement.

Mary and I knew of course that this was 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 gla.s.s 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 m.u.f.fled.

Perhaps it was Mary trying a new song. She has a good a.s.sortment 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 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 cl.u.s.tering 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 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!