494 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



to be ignorant of the mistake made when a drone-laying qneen depos- 

 its her egg in a royal cell, and dose the poor fellow to death, trying to 

 make a queen of him. In his investigation upon workers, Huber dis- 

 covered that they were of two kinds, wax-workers and nurse-bees : 

 the former are larger and stronger, and possess more perfect organs 

 for the secretion of wax than the latter, though no other difference 

 can be detected, and this seems merely the result of being reared in 

 smaller cells. 



Swanimerdam states that a blind or mutilated queen ceases to lay, 

 and that the workers of her hive no longer continue their labors, or 

 make any collections, as if aware that it is useless to do so ; but Hu- 

 ber shows that this is not wholly true. One queen deprived of her 

 four wings, and another of one antenna, continued to lay and to re- 

 ceive the homage of her subjects as before : but the amputation of 

 both antennae produced very different results. Queens, drones, and 

 workers, when deprived of both antenna?, lose their instincts, and seem 

 to be subject to a kind of delirium. They wander aimlessly about, 

 are unable to direct the proboscis for the reception of food, seek the 

 door of the hive, and soon perish. A fertile queen, besides these 

 symptoms, w r hich are common to all under the deprivation, drops her 

 eggs about the comb, and manifests no recognition of, or hostility to, 

 another mutilated queen. 



The first part of Huber's work here concludes with some valuable 

 suggestions in practical apiculture. The observations in the second 

 part were made by the aid, first, of his wife, and afterward by his son, 

 Pierre Huber, so well known through his investigations upon ants. 



In the year 1809, a bee made its appearance before one of Huber's 

 hives, which seemed to differ from its rightful inhabitants only by a 

 darker and less downy coat. Violent contests took place every day 

 between the native and the alien bees. Aristotle mentions " a black 

 bee which is called a thief," but Huber seems never to have heard this 

 suggestion, and supposed them to differ from his own bees in some 

 physical particulars. He, therefore, submitted them to Mdlle. Jurine 

 for dissection, and she discovered not only in them, but in all workers, 

 ovaries a fact which entirely overturned the theory of neuters which 

 had held its ground for so many centuries. The worker is not sex- 

 less, but is an imperfectly-developed female. This discovery throws 

 some light upon the wonderful change made by physical conditions in 

 the development of the worker-larvoe. With ordinary cell and food, 

 the worm develops into an insect possessed of feminine instincts, in 

 the provision which she makes for the young, and for the future needs 

 of the swarm ; while, with the larger cell and different food, the same 

 larva would develop into a physically perfect female, which, at the 

 same time, is wanting in all maternal instincts a divergence which 

 is undoubtedly one of the most marvelous in Nature, but a divergence 

 only, not a contradiction ! 





