BEE DANCES
By FRANK S. STUART IN April and May, almost all over the world, there take place some of the most amazing and intricate mass dances of the animal kingdom. Beekeepers are able to watch these dances through the glass panels of an observation-hive. The first Grand Dance of the year usually takes place when "palm" pollen appears on the bushes—that golden fairy dust so beloved of small children. Pollen is known among beekeepers as " bee bread," because- the bees collect and use it to make a feeding-mixture for the developing baby bees. When a foraging bee discovers the first "palm " pollen, she loads heavy quantities of it into the baskets on her hind legs. Then she flies triumphantly back to her own hive.
The beekeeper, with his nose flattened against the glass panel of the observation hive, watches her run swiftly past the bee sentries who stride up and down guarding the entrance. These sentries " cross whiskers " with each in-comer ; if she has not got the " hive smell " about her (each hive having its individual odour) her head and wings are bitten off by the old soldiers on guard ; but they permit their own people to pass safely up the ramp into the hive. There the pollen-carrier, with the two bright balls of yellow pollen on her legs, leaps up among the golden waxy masonry of the combs, runs to a spot near the centre of the nest where the baby beep are being attended to by their nurses, and swiftly unloads her baskets into a cell. This done, with the traces of pollen still on her legs, she commences a pas seul.
Always, when announcing pollen, she weaves to the right in a curving swing, and then waltzes swiftly back to the newly-loaded cell, where she begins to pirouette, swinging her tail and abdomen as a negress swings her hips in jazz. This violent dancing wafts the smell of the new pollen about the hive as an acolyte does with incense when swinging a censer. 0,n goes the dancer, now to the left and back' again, only to repeat, before the new pollen in the cell, another whirl of rhythmic worship. On the crowded combs the mysterious message seems to run with the speed of a radio announcement. More and more workers look up from their jobs.
\ 'any begin to race towards the new pollen cell. Some of them ry to touch the dancer with their quivering and eager antennae. In a matter of a minute the hive is commotion. And then comes -he most amazing part of the ceremony. Some of the forager bees detach themselves frorn.the combs, drop to the floor, and dart out )f the entrance—obviously bound for the feeding-ground their companion has discovered, for they all take wing strongly, whirl upwards and speed like bullets in the same direction.
How do they know where she came from? Bees cannot, apparently, communicate by sound anything except emotions. A hum of a certain pitch means danger, a low hum signals food, and so on ; but experiments appear to show that they are unable to indicate detail in this way. Many beekeepers believe that they can " talk " by a sort of semaphore with their antennae ; certainly some vigorous waving goes on whenever anything needs to be told. Did the pollen-bringer; who is still dancing in the hive, explain where her pollen came from? Or does some race-memory record where the first trees bloom? We do not know. Sometimes other pollen- gatherers return fully loaded before their informant has left the hive for a second trip. At other times her dance dies down more quickly, and finally she too drops to the floor and speeds out through the spring sunshine to the " palm," which is now thrumming with the noise of happy labour. As each bee returns loaded to the hive, she darts with her load to a cell near that in which the first pollen was stored, and follows the procedure of the first announcer. After an hour or two a Grand Dance is in progress, which expresses an intensity of happiness explained by the wonderful importance to the hive of this first find of the season of a Massed supply of new " bee bread."
Two or three weeks later the gooseberries come into blossom, and another sort of ceremonial dance begins. As before, the first finder races back to the hive, but this time her load is a pale honey. The honey is hastily put in a cell, and the bee begins 6) swing to right and left, always stopping before the loaded cell and pirouetting in wild delight like a pagan priestess before a new- garlanded altar whose sweet smell had possessed her excited brain. Once more the other bees lift their heads, rush at the dancer and touch her with their antennae as she goes whirling past. Once more, while she weaves her course through the darkness over the golden combs, other workers drop to the floor, dart from the entrance and take their course directly to the new field of food. Perhaps, as they beat straight upwards on leaving the hive, they can smell honey on the air and take their direction from that. But this is most unlikely, as sometimes the gooseberries may be two miles .distant, and wonderful as the bees' organ of smell certainly is, I do not think it is as keen as that. No ; I think that, somehow beyond human comprehension, the finder can tell her sisters where the new honey was found.
Any time towards the end of April or in the next two or three months, there may occur what is certainly the most wonderful of all bee dances, the Swarm Dance. Several days before this com- mences, the worker bees in the hive have selected one of the queen's recently-laid eggs and carried it to a special cell they are preparing. An ordinary cell is just large enough to admit a bee's body, but the "queen cell" is as large externally as the top joint of a woman's little finger. The egg is reverently placed in this cell, and a substance known by beekeepers as "Royal Jelly " is placed there by the bees in due time. This jelly is now the subject of most interesting chemical research. In the labOratory it has been used to make sterile rats into normal breeders ; and some investigators believe that eventually a method may be found of using it to overcome sterility in human beings. In the hive, it causes a normal egg that would have taken about three weeks to hatch into a sexless female bee, to hatch in two weeks into a fully- sexed queen. capable after mating of producing two thousand of her kind from eggs laid in a single day.
The bees usually set up, not one but several, queen cells, and then, perhaps ten days later, when the young queens are almost ready to emerge from their waxen sarcophagi, the workers com- mence the Swarm Dance. Observation through the beekeeper's
glass panel has already shown, for twenty-four hours or more, a reluctance to carry on ordinary work. The field bees are intensely excited, and though they race about the combs and frantically wave antennae at each other like old village women announcing some mighty scandal, they will not go out into the fields if they can possibly help it. They get as far as the entrance, and there they dart to and fro, completely demoralising the sentry and guard- bees, knocking other workers head-over-heels, and creating terrific commotion. Even the nurse-bees; quietest of the population, are disturbed, and their tiny charges sometimes get too much " bee bread" pummelled on to them, and at other times are only remem- bered at the last moment. The queen and her retinue usually withdraw from the riot, as if in fear or distaste.
When the Swarm Dance commences, it is not a pas seul this time, but an explosion of excitement throughout the hive as sudden as the bursting of a bomb. The fifty or sixty thousand bees who occupy the hive, all of whom are already in a wild degree of ten- sion, now, as if at the raising of an invisible baton, suddenly crouch —and then burst into frantic, yet ordered, motion. Perhaps twenty thousand or more of them drop in violent succession, like-a storm of enormous rain, to the floorboard, and pour forth. They dance over each other's backs, cavort beneath each other's bellies, come fifty together in a swirl as though round a Maypole, and pour out over the alighting-board like so much treacle. The sentries and guards are swept headlong into the mêlée, and even these hairless, hard-bitten warriors whizz their wings and kick up their tiny feet in the maddest of all the dances.
And then comes the extraordinary sight of a mid-air dance. Round and round they go, with a deep, glorious hunt that pro- vides Nature's own music to the aerial dance, as though Pan him- self were playing it. And now, as the beekeeper strains his eyes to peer between the half-empty combs, he sees a mob of the dancers who have not yet left the hive advance and surround the queen. Sometimes she shows great reluctance—almost enmity ; sometimes she walks towards the entrance with that stately resignation with which the Queen of France long ago walked towards the guillo- tine. For—poor royal lady—she has only once before in her life been out into the sunlight, on her wedding flight, and she fears light now. But the bees dance round her till first her escort and then often she herself become intoxicated with the joyous measure. If she is hesitant in the entrance, a group of dancers will swing against her and force her into the air ; and, once there, the sunlight and the sweetness of Spring enter into her, and she whirls away, leading twenty thousand dancers, who go round and round and over and under her, weaving a close and lovely pattern, high over the rooftops perhaps, or perhaps to a branch of apple blossom, where, after five minutes of ceremonial aerial dance, they cluster at last in a black, close mass.
Meanwhile, scout bees return and tell of some dry hollow in roof or tree, and the dance recommences and swings away across the sky towards the new home. There, another dance is already in progress. Clinging with spread legs, bees are deliberately open- ing their Nassenoff glands, while groups of dancers up-wind from them perform a whirling-winged measure to create a steady air- flow and drive out on to the air the scent by which the colony announces its acceptance of a new home. As the queen dances into its entrance, with her attendants circling round her, the hum of the fanning dancers takes on anew note of deep, entranced content.
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