THE AUSTRALIAN BEEKEEPERS’ JOURNAL. 
1f>4 
diameter, tightly clustered, you may be sure the | 
queen is in the centre o£ it, and in danger of 
being stung or smothered. Get the bees away 
from the queen as soon as possible, by smoking | 
or throwing the “ball” into water. When the 
queen is secured, she should be caged in the 
colony for 48 hours, when she may be safely 
liberated. 
Bees should be manipulated as little as 
possible, Sufficient fruit to last until fruit-trees j 
bloom in the spring should be provided in the 
fall, so that no manipulation of the hive will be 
necessary until settled warm weather in the 
spring. 
Bees will generally take care of themselves in 
the winter, if well prepared in the preceding 
autumn ; but a few hours attention in the spring 
is well spent time, and may result in saving j 
good colonies from starvation and dwindling, so 
that a few weeks later they will yield a handsome | 
profit. 
Big Tree Corners, N.Y. — Am. Be Journal. 
THE LANGUAGE OF BEES. 
Paper by Mr. Grimshaw , read before the British 
Beekeepers’’ Association, London, May 32, 
1889. 
In the first place, the use of the word 
1 language ’ is, to my mind, faulty as applied to 
insects, or, indeed, to any o.her animal excepting 
man : but as I fail to find another word express- 
ing exactly what I do mean, I will ask you to 
apply it only in Ihe sense of a method of 
expressing ideas. I take the word ‘ language ’ to 
convey the notion that a tongue and vocal organs 
are first necessary for the utterance of signs and 
sounds previously arranged by art into an orderly 
system, the comprehension of the meaning of 
these sounds being possible only to such indi- 
viduals as have been taught their meaning in the 
past. In other words, I cannot think of bees, 
nor of any other animal besides man, as possessing 
a language in the true and full sense of the word. 
The arrangement and development, of a real 
language is as much an artificial process as the 
invention of either an arithmetic or a system of 
mathematics; indeed, as much so as is the art of 
writing or telegraphy. It is only by some such 
use of his intellectual power than man proves 
his right to be classed as a superior being, 
endowed with something (reason, mind, soul) 
which lifis him far above the rest of animated 
nature. 
We have no direct information as to the 
language used by our reputed first ancestors, but 
I opine they conversed mostly by dumb show, 
incoherent exclamations, and facial expressions 
of varying emotions ; that as these signs began to 
be mutually understood, they formed the 
nucleus, and became the foundation, of a 
language. I could no more believe man was 
created having a ready-made language intuitively 
than I could believe him provided by nature with 
a Waterbury watch. Every tongue spoken by 
every race of living men, the unused languages 
of extinct peoples, who still live in their written 
records as much as the minds of the early writers 
vivify the ancient classes, all show themselves to 
be truly structural and orderly works of art 
(built up piecemeal on their foundations), as is 
the Acropolis of Athens or the Eiffel Tower. 
This cannot be the case with the methods of 
intercommunication used by bees. We must as 
much deny them the knowledge of a true 
language as we deny it to the infant, who has no 
royal road to its speech ; it has all to learn by 
hard experience from its first imitative utterance 
up to the fine period or the orator ; from the 
alphabet forwards, and backwards to its 
cuneiform decipherings. 
Let us mentally euter the bee-hive in search 
of the method by which our bees communicate 
ideas, impresions, desires, one to another. We 
may not be able to get much informotion beyond 
that already at our disposal in past writings, 
but perl aps we may dispel one or two false 
articles of faith which simply obtain until they 
are brought into the daylight of reason. Animals 
devoid of the gift of acquiring a language are 
compensated for this loss by an immense endow- 
ment of instinct, an intuitive and most electrical 
power of comprehension, an unreasoning, urging 
impulse, by means of which they are enabled to 
understand one another. In this way the broody 
hen utters her clucking long ere she hatches her 
chicks, and when a bird flies across the sky, 
hereditary alarm and solicitude for its young 
instinctively suggest to the mother the soaring of 
a hawk. Then follows the warning maternal 
shriek, and the instinctive rush ot her young ones 
to the shelter of her wings. Similar instances 
are plentiful in natural history, but they only 
convey to us an idea of the existence amongst 
animals of such a rude method of communicating 
ideas as is instanced by the effect on human 
beings of smiles or tears, laughter or crying, by 
the expression of the face, movements of the 
limbs, or by such dumb show and voice-tones as 
might be used by savages of different races in 
their attempts to intercommunicate, buch a low 
form of language as this is lofty as compared 
with that of our bees, for to utter and comprehend 
it demands the use of reason. Nothing perhaps, 
besides mechanical instinct, and irrational 
acquiescence in, and obedience to, the habits of 
the multitude, prompts or guides the bee in its 
wonderful operations in the hive. Such prompt- 
ings may be illustrated by the marshalling of a 
swarm of tadpoles in a stagnant pool, the orderly 
movement of a school of fish in the sea, or the 
regular deploying of an immense flight of birds in 
the air ; mysterious affairs, but not more so than 
the swarming of bees was considered a short time 
ago, or the movements of a cluster in wintering 
■ one cell higher ’ at a supposed given signal, the 
said signal simply being the advance of a top row 
of bees after having emptied the underlying cell, 
the underlying bees’ heads following those above 
them for warmth’s sake. 
