1921 



AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL 



495 



letter. — Ed.), but, as has been said, 

 everything is in harmony in the nat- 

 ural history of bees. 



Follow me another moment and you 

 will see a new point. 



For me to have told you that 

 queens were susceptible to jealousy, 

 I must have very evident proofs to 

 give you of so singular a thing. 



By what means can they be brought 

 to that and how can a feeling of jeal- 

 ousy and irxntation be inspired in 

 them, through the accomplishment of 

 the views that Nature intended? 



Let us return to the royal cells; it 

 is thei-e that the thread starts which 

 will lead us out of this labyrinth. 

 Their construction cannot be instan- 

 taneous; several days are needed dur- 

 ing which many workers are em- 

 ployed successively to build a pyramid 

 out of that which at first was shaped 

 only like an acorn cup. 



The queen, after having deposited 

 her egg at the bottom of the cup, con- 

 tinued to lay elsewhere very peace- 

 ably without giving the least sign of 

 alarm; it was only when the pyramid 

 was finished that we noticed in her 

 bearing a beginning of restlessness. 

 The royal larva was then filling the 

 cell to its extremity, she was about 

 to pass to the state of nymph, during 

 which she has no longer need of any 

 food. The closing of the cell at that 

 time proves it incontestably. 



The agitation of the queen in- 

 creased as fast as the young larva 

 grew towards its goal; from a very 

 noticeable displeasure the queen 

 passed very quickly to anger, and it 

 is not to be doubted that her rival was 

 the object of it. 



When we see her bending her en- 

 ergy upon her destruction and killing 

 her in her cradle when the bees do 

 not put any obstacles in the way of 

 this fury, do you not recognize that 

 the most cruel jealousy has been the 

 only incentive of it? The intention 

 of nature would not be fulfilled if 

 that of the queen was accomplished ; 

 if she could kill her rivals in infancy 

 there would be no hopes for swarms, 

 and the colony would perish; the 

 workers taught by kind Nature to op- 

 pose this, do it effectively, by sur- 

 rounding the royal cells with guards 

 numerous enough to prevent the ef- 

 fect of the queen's rage; they always 

 succeed in doing so by opposing her 

 approach without ever using their 

 sting against this mother so cher- 

 ished; they succeed in drawing or 

 driving her away, by climbing on her 

 back and striking her with their an- 

 tenna, which is now known to be a 

 very expressive language. 



The bees, the ants, like all the be- 

 ings which live in association and 

 whose operations require a sort of 

 concert, must understand each other 

 and have some means of communicat- 

 ing to one another their thoughts, their 

 needs, their desires, their fears and 

 above all their dangers. Among in- 

 sects which we have observed, the 

 repeated and varied touching of the 

 antennae warn them and instruct them 

 of what they need to know. 



Another means of information in- 



structs the bees of that which inter- 

 ests the queen; I have made sure of 

 that in case of her death or her dis- 

 appearance. To convince oneself of 

 this, it is only necessary to remove 

 the queen from the bees; one will see 

 nothing in the first moments to prove 

 that her loss has been detected, but 

 at the end of a half hour one cannot 

 doubt it. The confusion which reigns 

 in the hive, the abandoning of the 

 brood, the running about of the work- 

 ers, their precipitate flight at undue 

 hours, their reseai'ches around the 

 hive, later the re-establishment of 

 good order and especially the prepara- 

 tions which they make to rear another 

 queen prove that they have perceived 

 the loss, but do not explain how. 



It is always the old queen that leads 

 the first swarm; she goes with it 

 after showing by her growing agita- 

 tion that she gives up to the terror 

 caused by the existence of young 

 rivals in the cradles, but as she does 

 not wait until they have reached the 

 end of their grovrth and can leave the 

 royal cell, she goes with her swarm 

 without having done any harm to her 

 young rivals; murder takes place only 

 after the departure of the old queen. 

 The one who succeeds immediately 

 finds rivals, at her birth, they are very 

 dangerous for her; their age about 

 equal to hers does not permit her to 

 wait until they also hatch, but she 

 pounces upon the still sealed cells, 

 pierces them and kills with her sting 

 the royal nymphs of which she per- 

 ceives the existence through some un- 

 known sense. 



The appearing of royal cells and 

 the jealousy which they inspire in the 

 reigning queens are therefore truly 

 that which procures the accomplish- 

 ment of the views of Nature and the 

 means employed by the latter to in- 

 duce the bees to fly away from their 

 native home and seek their conserva- 

 tion by periodical migi'ations. 



I thought that I had seen and 

 faithfully described evei-ything that 

 has reference to the natural history 

 of swarms; that which has just hap- 

 pened to me proves that one can 

 never be too careful or too modest. 

 I find in a forgotten memorandum of 

 mine the detail of an observation 

 which had taken my attention in the 

 old days and of which I had not re- 

 tained the recollection; it is dated of 

 the year 1816. 



That year which has properly been 

 called the year of famine, did not 

 open in Geneva as likely to be as 

 fatal to bees as it was to all our crops. 



The fine blooming of the early 

 spring, the warm and moist tempera- 

 ture which reigned at that epoch 

 caused the honey and pollen to 

 abound in the blossoms. The drones, 

 which appeared early in all our hives, 

 announced early swarms; that expec- 

 tation was realized; I never saw so 

 many; 10 or 12 hives which I had at 

 the end of winter multiplied by the 

 end of June to the number of 60. 



I was then using leaf hives, glassed 

 only at their posterior end. That is 

 where our attention was directed, 

 when we recognized the well-known 



signs of swarming; that moment is 

 when all the bees, excited by the ir- 

 ritation of their queen, think only of 

 following her, leaving their native 

 home and going elsewhere for a new 

 country. That is what every one 

 knew, or should have known, accord- 

 ing to the excellent memoix-s of Reau- 

 mur. 



Let us see what will happen to 

 those fugitives, leaving foolishly 

 their apparently well furnished 

 homes, supplied with everything that 

 they needed, to prefer to it such 

 homes as they would accidentally find 

 and which would undoubtedly be lack- 

 ing in what would be to their con- 

 venience. 



What will happen to them if the 

 weather changes at the moment of 

 their entrance into a tree trunk or in 

 the cavity of a rock, especially if the 

 bad weather is prolonged 5 or 6 days? 

 That is not difficult to divine; they 

 will starve infallibly. Their greatest 

 torment will be the discouragement 

 into which they will fall when they 

 will see that their queen, finding no 

 cells in which to lay her eggs, will be 

 compelled to drop them in the air, 

 and consequently that all hope of 

 posterity will vanish. (This discour- 

 agement in similar cases has been ob- 

 served by others). 



No, no. it is not at a time when 

 these beings which prove of so great 

 an interest to us have the greatest 

 need of a superior direction that it is 

 refused to them. 



When the bees are about to leave 

 their home forever, when everything 

 seems to be in confusion among 

 them, one can see them pounce upon 

 the combs in which the honey has 

 been stored, which are always the 

 farthest away from the entrance. We 

 have seen them entirely strip 3 large 

 combs of honey in a few minutes. 

 Time pressed, it was necessary to fol- 

 low the queen, and they knew it. 



We made this observation on so 

 large a number of swarms in 1816 

 and since that date, that I have no 

 doubts whatever upon this matter. 

 (To be continued) 



BEESTINGS AS CURE 



By A. F. Bonney 



When first the writer began in bee- 

 keeping, the bee journals were filled 

 with accounts of cures of rheuma- 

 tism by the use of beesting poison, 

 commonly supposed to be formic acid. 

 He combated this idea, and it was not 

 long before such articles became rare. 

 Recently, however, one appeared in 

 the American Bee Journal, and 1 

 wish to advance a few ideas to com- 

 bat the fallacy, for such the medical 

 men generally consider it, if we ex- 

 cept our friends, the Homeopaths. 



Rheumatism has always been the 

 despair of physicians, of the Tradi- 

 tion or Regular school, the "Allo- 

 paths," so called. For generations 

 the disease was supposed to be due to 

 uric acid in the blood, but that theory 

 was long since abandoned, and we 

 now know that it is caused by the ab- 

 sorption into the circulation of poi- 



