A CHAT ON BOOKS.

Otago Witness, Issue 2541, 26 November 1902, Page 61

A CHAT ON BOOKS.

"The Life of the Bee," by Maurice Maeterlinck, translated from the original by Alfred Sutro, is the book I have chosen for our consideration to-day. This I have done in response to my letters expressing the pleasure felt by the writers in the brief glance we were able to obtain some time since of another book by the same author — "The Treasure of the Humble." In devoting some wages to noting the works of well-known authorities on beea and their habits, culture, and breeding, the author says: — "I shall scarcely say anything that those will not know who are familiar with bees. The notes and experiments I have made during my 20 years of bee-keeping I shall reserve for a technical work. . . . Anxious not to overburden this essay, I wish to speak of the bees very simply, as one speaks of a subject he knows andl loves, to those who know it not. . . I have not yet forgotten the first apiary I saw, where I learned to love the bees. It waa many years ago in a large village of Dutch Flanders, the sweet and pleasant I country whose love for brilliant colour rivals that of Zealand even. ... A country that gladly spreads before us ... her illuminated gables, and waggons, and towers ; her cupboards and cloaks that J gleam at the end of the passage ; her little trees marshalled in line along quays and canal banks ; her boats and her barges i with sculptured poops ; her flower-like doors

and windows, immaculate dams, and elaborate many-coloured drawbridges ; and her little varnished houses, bright as new pottery, from which bell-shaped dames come forth, all a-glitter with silver and gold, to milk the cows in the white-hedged fields or spread the linen on flowery lawns, cut into patterns of oval and lozenge, and most astonishingly green.

"To this spot an aged philosopher, weary of interrogating men, and desirous of resting alone with Nature, had retired. His happiness lay all in his garden ; and best beloved, visited most often, was the apiary, composed of 12 domes of straw, some of wbich he had painted a bright pink and some a clear yellow, but most of all a tender blue, having noticed . . . the bees fondness for this colour. These hives stood against the wall of the house, in the angle formed by one of those pleasant and graceful Dutch kitchens whose earthenware dresser, all bright with copper and tin, reflected itself through the open dpor on to the peaceful canal. And the water, burdened with these familiar images beneath its curtain of poplars, led one's eyes to a. calm horizon of mills and of meadows."

I confess I found it imposible to pass this exquisite little picture, even at the rhk of your impatience, my dear readers !

"The first impression of the novice before whom an observation hive is opened will be one of some disappointment. . . . All that he sees is a confused ma«s of little reddish groups, somewhat resembling wasted coffee berries or bunches of raisins piled against the glass. They look more dead than alive ; their movements are slow, incoherent, and incomprehensible. . . . It is with them as with all that is deeply real: they must be studied, and one must learn how to study them. . . . Indeed, every one of the little, almost motionless, groups in the hive is incessantly working, each at a different trade. Repose is unknown to any : and such for instance as seem the most torpid, as they lean in dull clusters against the glass, are entrusted with the jaoet mysterious md. fatiguing

task of all ; it is they who secrete and form the wax. . . . "The uee is above all a creature of the crowd. She can only live in the midst of a multitude. . . . Isolate her, and, however abundant the food or favourable the temperature, she will expire in a few days . . . of loneliness. From the crowd, from the city, she derives an invisible ailment that is as necessary to her as honey. This craving will help to explain the spirit which animates the laws of the hive. {For in them the individual is nothing, her very existence conditional only, and herself, for one indifferent moment, a winged organ of the race. Her whole life is an entire sacrifice to the manifold, everlasting being of which she is but a part." Mr Maeterlinck then goes on to point out that this perfect renunciation and self-sacrifice of the bee is the result of development and evolution. In the various kinds of wild bee? and nomad bees, which stand at the bottom of the bee family, and are to our garden bees what the Black fellows or African dwarfs are to vs — there principles are unknown. But, "at last we arrive, through successive stages, at the almost perfect but pitiless society of our hives, where the individual is entirely merged in the republic, and the republic in its turn invariably sacrificed to the abstract city- of the 1 future." We will pass rapidly, but reluctantly, on to the chapter headed ' THE SWARM. "The queen started laying in the very first days of February (our August or .September), and the workers have flocked to the Avillows'and nut trees, gorse and violets, anemones and lungworts. Then spring invades the earth, and cellar and attic stream with honey and pollen, while each day be-

holds the birth of thousands of bees. The overgrown males now all sally forth from their cells, and disport themselves on the combs ; so crowded does the too prosperous city become that hundreds of belated workers, coming back from the flowers towards evening, will vainly seek shelter within, and will be forced to spend the night on the threshold, when they Will be decimated by the cold.

"Restlessness serges upon the people, and the old queen begins to stir. She feels that a new destiny is being prepared. . . . An invincible power menaces her tranquility; she will soon be forced to quit this city of hers where she has reigned. But this city is her work ; it is she, herself." Yet she, queei' though she be, must await in patience the mandates of the marvellous community over which she reigns — the pitiles-s fiat of 'the spirit of the hive!' This commercial instinct disposes of the wealth and happiness the liberty and life, of all this winged people; and yet with discretion, as though governed itself bysome great duty. . . . The spirit of the hive is prudent and thrifty, but by no means parsonomious. ... It toleiates v during summer days of abundance, the embarra^ing presence in the hive of three or four hundred males, from who«c ranks the future queen will select her lover : three or four hundred foolish, clumsy, useless, noisy creatures who are ... gluttonous, dirty, coarse . . and scandalously idle."

"Finally it is the spirit of the hive that fixes the hour of the great animal sacrifice to the gemous of the race : the hour, that is of the swarm, when we find a whole people, who have attained the topmost pinnacle of prosperity and power, suddenly abandon to the generation to ?orne their wealth and theiv palaces, their homes and the fruits of their labour; themselves content to encounter the hardship 0 , and peiil? of a new and distant country."

"Never," says M. Maeterlinck, *'ir the hive more beautiful than on the eve of its heroic renouncement. Let us endeavour to

height of a dome more colossal, propof* tionately, than that of St. Peters at Rome* waxen walls descend to the ground Each of these walls, whose substance stjU is immaculate and fragrant of original, sil«< very freshness, contains thousands of cell*; stored with provisions sufficient to feed thej whole people for several weeks. Here* lodged in transparent cells, are the pollens* love ferment of ev«y flower of spring, making brilliant splashes of red andl yellow, of black and mauve. Close by, sealed vritU a seal to be broken only in days of extreme distress, the honey of April (our October) is stored, most limpid and perfumed of all, in 20,000 reservoirs that form a magni* ficent embroidery of gold, whose borders hang stiff and rigid.

"'Still lower, the honey of May matures in great open vats, by whose side watchful guards maintain an incessant current of air."

"In the centre, and far from the light, in the warmest part of the hive, there) stands the abode of the future ; here doea it sleep and wake. For this is the royal domain of the brood cells, set apart for the queen and her attendants — about 10,000 cells, wherein the eggs repose ; fifteen or sixteen thousand chambers tenanted by larvae; 40,000 dwellings inhabitated bywhite nymphs, to whom thousands of muses minister. And finally, in the holy of holies" of these parts, are the three, four, six, or twelve palaces, vast -in size compared -with the others, where the adolescent princesses lie who await their hour, wrapped in a! kind of shroud, all of' them motionless and pale, and fed in the darkness."

But though all be thus wisely arranged and provisioned for the swarming, and- the* spirit of the hive enjoining all its inmates with the restless fever of an approaching crisis, the bee-keeper has only to destroy in their cells the young queens for the tumult instantly to subside, preparations for the flitting to cease, and the ordinary routine of work to recommence. Her young successors slain, the old queen becomes essential once more, and renounces for this year her desire for freedom and sunshine.. She tranquilly resumes her work of laying two or three thousand eggs a day. But should nothing occur to interrupt th» preparations for swarming, over the whols surface of the golden corridors that divided the parallel walls the workers will make preparation for the journey. Each will first of all 'burden herself with provision of honey sufficient for five or six days. From this honey that they carry within them they will distil,- by a chemical process still unexplained, the wax required for the immediate construction of buildings. They will provide themselves also with a certain! amount of propolis, a kind of resin, withi which they will seal all the crevices in the new dwelling, strengthen weak places, varnish the walls, , and exclude the light — for the bees love to work in almost total' ob-

scurity. . . . Famine and death would await them but for this foresight of theirs.' . . . Even if the bee-keeper deposit thef hive in which he has gathered the old queen and her attendant cluster of bees by thji side of the hive they have but this moment quitted . . . all, one by one, will perish of hunger and cold round their unfortunate queen rather than return to the home ot theh* birth, whose sweet odour of plenty, the fragrance indeed of their own past labour, reaches them even in their distress. . . . None would come to their help, nor would they seek any. For one city knows not the other, and assistance is never given, And here I must quote a few sentences bearing on this curious characteristic?. "There is a strange duality in the character of the bee. In the heart of the hive -all help and love each other. . . . Wdund one of them, and a thousand will sacrifice themselves to avenge its injury. But outside the hive they no longer recognise each other. . . . Were you to mutilate or crush on a piece of comr. placed a few steps from their dwellings 20 or 30 bees that have all issued from the same hive, those you have left untouched will not even turn their heads . . . they will continue to absorb the liquid they hold more precious than life, heedless of the agony, whose last gestures are almost touching them, of the cries of distress that rise around them." _. With this last quotation I must close the' pages, having given you indeed but » glimpse of the treasures that are stored there, though I have far exceeded my usual limits of space in my desire to do justice to this notable book.