Students of old books on the honey-bee—and perhaps there has been more written about bees during the last two thousand years than of all other creatures put together—do not quite know what to make of Moses Rusden, who was Charles the Second’s bee-master, and wrote his “Further Discovery of Bees” in the year 1679. The wonder about Rusden is that obviously he knew so much that was true about bee-life, and yet seems, of set purpose, to have imparted so little. He was a shrewdly observant man, of lifelong experience in his craft. His system of bee-keeping would not have disgraced many an apiculturist of the present time, often yielding him a honey harvest averaging sixty pounds to the hive, which is a result not always achieved even by our foremost apiarian scientists. His hives were fitted with glass windows, through which he was continually studying his bees. He must have had endless opportunities of proving the fallacy and folly of the ancient classic notions as to bee-life. And yet we find him gravely upholding almost the entire framework of fantastic error, old even in Pliny’s time; and speaking of the king-bee with his generals, captains, and retinue, honey that was a dew divinely sent down from heaven, the miraculous propagation of bee-kind from the flowers, and all the other curious myths and fables handed down from writer to writer since the very earliest days.

But, reading on in the little time-stained, worm-eaten book, it is not very difficult to guess at last why Rusden adopted this attitude. He was the King’s bee-master, and therefore a courtier first and a naturalist afterwards. In the first flush of the Restoration, anyone who had anything to say in support of the divine right of kings was certain to catch the Royal eye. Rusden admits himself conversant with Butler’s “Feminine Monarchie,” published some fifty years before, in which the writer argues that the single great bee in a hive was really a female. To a man of Rusden’s practical experience and deductive quality of mind, this statement must have lead, and no doubt did lead, to all sorts of speculations and discoveries. But with a ruler of Charles the Second’s temperament, feminine monarchies were not to be thought of. Rusden saw at once his restrictions and his peculiar opportunity, and wrote his book on bees, which is really an ingenious attempt to show that the system of a self-ruling commonwealth is a violation of nature, and that, whether for bees or men, government under a king is the divinely ordained state.

Whether, however, Rusden was deliberately insincere, or actually succeeded in blinding himself conveniently for his own purposes, it must be admitted not only that he argued the case with singular adroitness, but that never did facts adapt themselves so readily to either conscious or unconscious misrepresentation. In the glass-windowed hives of the Royal bee-house at Saint James’s, he was able to show the King a nation of creatures evidently united under a common rule, labouring together in harmony and producing works little short of miraculous to the mediÆval eye. He saw that these creatures were of two sorts, each going about its duty after its kind, but that in each colony there was one bee, and only one, which differed entirely from the rest. To this single large bee all the others paid the greatest deference. It was cared for and nourished, and attended assiduously in its progress over the combs. All the humanly approved tokens of royalty were manifest about it. No wonder the King’s bee-master was not slow in recognising that, in those troublous times, he could do his patron no greater service than by pointing out to the superstitious and ignorant multitude—still looking askance at the restored monarchy—such indisputable evidence in nature of Charles’s parallel right.

And perhaps nature has never been at such pains to conceal her true processes from the vulgar eye as in this case of the honey-bee. If Rusden ever suspected that the one large bee in each colony was really the mother of all the rest, and had set himself to prove it, he would have found the whole array of visible facts in opposition to him. If ever a truth seemed established beyond all reasonable doubt, it was that the ordinary male-and-female principle, pertaining throughout the rest of creation, was abrogated in the single instance of the honey-bee. The ancients explained this anomaly as a special gift from the gods, and the bees were supposed to discover the germs of bee-life in certain kinds of flowers and to bring them home to the cells for development. Rusden improved upon this idea by assigning to his king-bee the duty of fertilising these embryos when they were placed in the cells, for he could not otherwise explain a fact of which he was perfectly well aware—that the large bee travelled the combs unceasingly, thrusting its body into each cell in turn. Rusden also held that the worker-bees were females, but only—as Freemasons would say—in a speculative manner. They neither laid eggs nor bore young. Their maternal duties consisted only in gathering the essence of bee-life from the blossoms and nursing and tending the young bees when they emerged from their cradle-cells. The drones were a great difficulty to Rusden. To admit them to be males—as some held even in his day—would have been against the declared object of his book, as tending to entrench upon royal prerogatives. Luckily, this truth was as easy of apparent refutation as all the rest. No one had ever detected any traffic of the sexes amongst bees either in or out of the hives; nor, indeed, is such detection possible. The fact that the queen-bee has concourse with the drone only once in her whole life, and that their meeting takes place in the upper air far out of reach of human observation, is knowledge only of yesterday. In Rusden’s time such a marvel was never even suspected. As the drones, therefore, were never seen to approach the worker bees or to notice them in any way, and as also young bees were bred in the hives during many months when no drones existed at all, Rusden’s ingenuity was equal to the task of bringing them into line with his theory.

If he had lived a few decades earlier, and it had been Cromwell, instead of the heartless, middle-aged rake of a sovereign, whom he had to propitiate, no doubt Rusden would have asked his public to swallow Pliny’s whole apiarian philosophy at a gulp. Bee-life would then have been held up as a foreshadowing of celestial conditions, and the facts would have lent themselves to this view equally as well. But his task was to represent the economy of the hive as a clear proof of divine authority in kingship, and it must be conceded that, as far as knowledge went in those days, he established his case.

His book was published under the Ægis of the Royal Society, and “by his Majestie’s especial Command,” which was less a testimony of the King’s love for natural history than of his political astuteness. Apart, however, from its peculiar mission, the book is interesting as a sidelight on the old bee-masters and their ways. Probably it represents very fairly the extent of knowledge at the time, which had evidently advanced very little since the days of Virgil. Rusden taught, with the ancients, that honey was a secretion from the stars, and that wax was gathered from the flowers, as well as the generative matter before mentioned. He had one theory which seems to have been essentially his own. The little lumps of many-coloured pollen, which the worker-bees fetch home so industriously in the breeding season, he held to be the actual substance of the young bees to come, in an elementary state. These, he tells us, were placed in the cells, having absorbed the feminine virtues from their bearers on the way. The king-bee then visited each in turn, vivifying them with his essence, after which they had nothing to do but grow into perfect bees. He got over the difficulty of the varying sexes of the bees bred in a hive by asserting that these lumps of animable matter were created in the flowers, either female, or neuter—as he called the drones—or royal, as the case might be. Having denied the drones any part in the production of their species, or in furnishing the needs of the hive, Rusden was hard put to it to find a use for them in a system where it would have been lÈse-majestÉ to suppose anything superfluous or amiss. He therefore hits upon an idea which, curiously enough, embodies matter still under dispute at the present time, although it is being slowly recognised as a truth. Rusden says the use of the drones is to take the place of the other bees in the hive when these are mostly away honey-gathering. Their great bodies act as so many warming stoves, supplying the necessary heat to the hatching embryos and the maturing stores of honey. It is well known that drones gather together side by side, principally in the remoter parts of the hive, often completely covering these outer combs. They seldom rouse from their lethargy of repletion to take their daily flight until about midday, when most of the ingathering work is over, and the hive is again fairly populous with worker-bees. Probably, therefore, Rusden was quite right in his theory, which, hundreds of years after, is only just beginning to be accepted as a fact.