PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE 



of it. Reaumur, having isolated a queen and a male, wit- 

 nessed a play or combat with movements which he inter- 

 preted with ingenuity. He could not see the actual coup- 

 ling, which only takes place in the air. His story, is 

 unique and nothing since has confirmed it. He shows 

 us a queen approaching a male, sucking him with her 

 proboscis, offering him honey, stroking him with her feet, 

 and finally irritated by the coldness of her suitor, mount- 

 ing his back, applying her vulva to the male organ, 

 which Reaumur describes very well ("Memoirs," tome 

 V) and which he represents as covered with a white 

 viscous liquid. The real preludes, at least in a state of 

 liberty, contradict the great observer. The female seems 

 in no way aggressive. Here are the three authentic 

 accounts I have been able to discover: 



"6th July, 1849, M. Hannemann, bee-keeper at Wur- 

 temburg, Thuringia was seated near my hive when his 

 attention was aroused by an unaccustomed buzzing. 

 Suddenly he saw thirty or forty drones" (i. e., false 

 drones, male bees) "rapidly pursuing a queen-bee, about 

 twenty or thirty feet up in the air. The group filled a 

 space about two feet in diameter. Sometimes, in their 

 flight, they came as low as ten feet from the ground, 

 then rose, flying north to south. He followed them about 

 a hundred yards, then a building interrupted him. The 

 group of drones formed a sort of cone with the queen at 

 the summit, then the cone enlarged into a globe of which 

 she was the centre: at this moment the queen succeeded 

 in getting away and rose vertically, still followed by 

 the drones who had reformed the cone under her." l 



1 Bienenzeitung (Gazette des Abeilles) Janvier, 1850. 

 159 



