80 PROCEEDINGS OF THE" AMERICAN ACADEMY 



drone. It would, therefore, be of considerable interest to know wheth- 

 er such cells are occupied by one or the other of these kinds of bees. 

 The determination of this point is important on another account. Sie- 

 bold has ascertained that drones do not require impregnation, while 

 the workers as well as the queens do ; and as the act of impregnation 

 is voluntary with the queen, she is supposed to have some guide to in- 

 form her whether a given egg is to become one or the other kind, for 

 she never makes a mistake and impregnates an egg in a drone cell, or 

 omits to impregnate one in a worker cell. Siebold, therefore, supposes 

 that the queen is guided by the size of the mouth of the cell, and if 

 the abdomen touches one kind, impregnation takes place, and if the 

 other, not. The transitional cells- being intermediate, would not by 

 their size give her the usual indication. 



Honey Cells. — When the stock of honey becomes greater than the 

 ordinary brood cells will contain, the bees either enlarge these, or add 

 to them other cells often of larger capacity, or construct a new comb, 

 devoted entirely to the storing of honey. While the cells of this last 

 are built unequivocally in accordance with the hexagonal type, they 

 exhibit a range of variation from it which almost defies description. 

 Of all who have written on the subject, Mr. Langstroth is the only one 

 we have met with who seems to have particularly mentioned their ir- 

 regularity, which he does in the following words : " Those [cells] in 

 which the honey is stored vary greatly in depth, while in diameter 

 they are of all sizes, from that of a worker to that of drone cells." * 

 We have found them even 2.10 inches in depth, or four times that of a 

 worker cell ; sometimes they are square or pentagonal ; their align- 

 ment is rarely if ever exact, so that the presence of a fourth face is 

 more common than with the other kinds. The basal pyramid changes 

 constantly ; the cast of a ' piece of comb, containing over four hundred 

 cells, showed but few in which there was not some irregularity obvious 

 to the eye ; either the faces were unequal, or there was a fourth, and 

 even a fifth face, or the pyramid was too high or too low, or suppressed, 

 or the body of the cell was not equilateral, or its angles too large or 

 too small. The normal angle which one side makes with its adjoining 

 ones is 120° ; the following measurements, taken from casts of average 

 specimens, exhibit a degree of variation by no means unusual. 



* On the Honey -Bee, p. 74. New York, 1859. 



