1883 



JUVENltE GLEANiKGS. 



489 



All things dissolved, the sparks of heavenly flame 



Return and merge again whence first they came. 



No death exists; there is no place to die. 



But only living through all space to fly; 



To take one's lot where lofty heaven appears, 



And join the harmony of starry spheres. 



(1) fie gets it a little mixed, our author does, but 

 he is on the track of the truth. The worker bees 

 are entirely free from sexual impulses, and that is 

 the main thing claimed. Furthermore, reproduc- 

 tion without generation does exist in the hive under 

 certain conditions. How much better is Virgil's 

 stumbling pursuit of truth, in ancient twilight, than 

 the stubborn ignorance of the modern editor of my 

 volume of the poem! Just hear him. "This ac- 

 count of the production of bees here given by the 

 poet, is justly exploded. It is found that no animal 

 is produced without the concurrence of the sexes." 

 If bees only were subjects of investigation, some 

 minds would continue to deny; but examination of 

 the aphides, or plant lice, has knocked the breath 

 out. of the negative party. Among these latter in- 

 sects, parthenogenesis exists in a more perfect form 

 than among bees, and is their usual mode of repro- 

 duction. 



(2) The original reads, ^'Brj mouth they gather 

 children." Observations In Virgil's time seem to have 

 noted the royal jelly, and the fact that bees put it 

 into the cells with their mouths. That the jelly is a 

 product of digestion and secretion, they failed, 

 seemingly, to find out. No theory was then open 

 but that theygathered it direct from the plants they 

 visited. Overlooking the fact that the queen-cell, 

 before the royal jelly is put in, contains an egg, they 

 probably regarded the jelly itself as nature's semi- 

 nal fluid, out of which the larval queen sprang, like 

 their own Venus from the foam of the sea — a fine 

 illustration of how easy it is to get near the truth 

 and yet miss of it. Had they examined the develop- 

 ment of larvte in the worker cells, they could hardly 

 have missed discovering the existence and hatching 

 of eggs; so I guess they stopped short of that point, 

 merely noticing that a similar jelly was sometimes 

 seen in worker cells. Or perhaps they saw the eggs, 

 and thought they were little pellets of royal jelly 

 rolled up by the workers. 



^ (3) Calling the young bees " little Romans" is an 

 extra good hit. 



(4) Here there is exact agreement with good mod- 

 ern authority — that many* bees perish simply by 

 their wings getting too ragged to fly with. 



(5) The death of these poor little fellows is pathet- 

 ic, is it not? It happens usually, I believe, when 

 night is approaching, or a shower. They have found 

 plenty of honey, and, forgetting that they can not 

 carry quite as much as they once could, they take all 

 they can hold of it. A chill is creeping upon the air. 

 They feel a little benumbed and stiff; and on trying 

 their wings for home they settle to the ground. It 

 is still colder down there, and they never rise again. 

 Before warmth and brightness return to earth, all is 

 over. 



(6) The queen's usual term of life Is three or four 

 years, and its extreme limit probably about" seven 

 years, just as 8:ated. It is comparatively easy to 

 mark a queen and see how long she lives, but very 

 hard to keep track of an individual worker. I pre- 

 sume, therefore, that the ancients made some suc- 

 cessful experiments determining the age of queens, 

 and then guessed that workers would live about the 

 same, if no accident befel them. A worker's usual 



term of life is about six weeks in midsummer, and 

 six weeks plus the length of time that he remains 

 quiet in the hive at the other end of the year. 



(7) There is some " stuffing " in both ancient and 

 modern talk about bees' loyalty to their sovereign ; 

 but a good solid basis of fact is left after the stuffing 

 is shaken out. I suspect that the Egyptians and 

 Lydians, and the rest, reverenced their kings large- 

 ly because they dared not do otherwise; while the 

 regard of the bees for their queen is not enforced 

 but voluntary, 



(8) A little exaggeration creeps in here also. Ut- 

 ter recklessness and hopelessness is not reached at 

 once when the queen is lost; that is, in ordinary 

 cases it is not. If they have larvte to raise another 

 queen from, the disorder and hurry-scurry Is soon 

 quieted, and things move on tolerably well again. 



(9) Careful economy in the use of stores, and great 

 reluctance to uncap sealed honey, are prominent In 

 well-ordered colonies. I rather think queenless col- 

 onies do sometimes get very reckless about such 

 matters. The general rip and tear and ruin in a 

 queenless hive comes, however, in an Indirect way. 

 Robber bees come in, and the inmates are too indif- 

 ferent to flght them; and robbers tear combs to 

 pieces, rather than take the trouble to crawl into 

 deep cells. Wax-moths and other insects and worms 

 come in, and little resistance is made. After awhile 

 the bees take a short spasm of energy, and try to get 

 rid of the worms by tearing away the combs; but 

 they soon give up again. So matters go on until a 

 hideous mass of rubbish and webs and worms is all 

 that remains of the beautiful structures within. 



(10) This, I believe, is correct. 



(11) Perhaps some non-bee-keeping reader has al- 

 ready picked upon this as some of the stuffing that 

 ought to be got rid of. I am not ready to consent. 

 I think there is sometimes a genuine readiness to 

 shield the queen by putting themselves in front. It 

 is true, that when a frame is taken out, both queen 

 and bees at times seem to take pride in behaving 

 just as they do in the hive; and you pick up the 

 queen without any one's so much as saying " why do 

 ye so?" But let them be a little suspicious and ex- 

 cited, and you grasp at the queen and suddenly find 

 workers in the way. Am I right about this, friend 

 Root? You have handled many more queens than I. 



(13) This doctrine is what is called Pantheism. It 

 is still a very attractive form of belief for those who 

 want a religion for the intellect, that can not by any 

 possibility touch the heart anywhere. It is certain- 

 ly very remarkable that the qualities displayed by 

 bees should be chosen as a chief evidence that God 

 is incarnated in all creatures. 



(13) This strikingly shows how near beneficent 

 truth and destructive error can come to each other. 

 Few can deny that these lines sound plausible as 

 well as beautiful. But, the God of the Bible is pres- 

 ent among all things. The pantheist's God is an 

 intjredient of all things. The God of the Bible is a 

 person, and can be loved. The pantheist's God is 

 scarcely more than a bi-chemical; and chemicals can 

 neither love nor be loved. Pantheism is a very an- 

 cient doctrine; and the passage of Scripture found 

 in I. Kings 19: 11, 13, is probably intended as a direct 

 denial of it. Pantheism tricks us with a promise of 

 future life; but anon we discover that our future 

 condition is to be neither more nor less than what it 

 was ages before we were born. Pantheism is a beau- 

 tiful guess, unsupported. Christianity is a beauti- 

 ful system with evidence behind it. Notice, also, 



