i yo THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



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 there- 

 fore 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 prop- 

 erly 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 infre- 

 quently 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 



