194 TRANSACTIONS, NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY OF GLASGOW. 



XVIII. 



ON PARTHENOGENESIS IN THE 

 HYMENOPTERA . 



BY P. CAMERON, F.E.S. 



[Read 24th April, 1888.] 



In the very excellent book by Mr. F. R. Cheshire on 

 the Honey-Bee (Bees and Bee-keeping, vol. i., p. 223), 

 it is stated that if an Italian qneen be mated 

 with an ordinary English drone, the workers and 

 queens will partake of hybrid characters, but the 

 drones " will still be absolutely Italian, again show- 

 ing that, although their mother was impregnated, 

 her impregnation had in no way influenced their 

 (i,e., the drones') generation, or that they had, as 

 before, a mother, but no father ; so that the eggs 

 whence they had come had in some way escaped 

 fertilisation ; " — in other words, that the drones 

 had been produced parthenogenetically. 



I am not going to deny that as a general rule the 

 drones with the hive-bee are of parthenogenetic 

 origin, for that fact is placed beyond dispute. What 

 I dispute is that the drones may not sometimes be 

 the result of sexual generation ; and I am desirous 

 of pointing out that the rule that the drone-eggs 

 are never fertilised may not be absolute, and does 

 not take the form of an invariable law as the strict 

 upholders of Dzerzon's theory would have us believe. 

 Not only is there no a priori reason why this 

 should be so, but there are some facts which go far 

 to prove that drones are not infrequently produced 

 from fertilised eggs. 



If in other species of insects it was the invariable 

 rule that only males were produced parthenogeneti- 

 cally, there would then be some reason for conclud- 

 ing on a priori grounds that only males could be 



