2 86 READINGS IN BIOLOGICAL SCIENCE 



For various reasons we often want to give a new queen to a colony — a 

 queen of our own selection, which is quite possible if done correctly. First 

 we must remove the present queen and be sure that no laying worker is 

 at hand. It is well to wait three or four days until the bees have themselves 

 built queen cells and begun to raise new queens. Then destroy all these 

 beginnings, and the colony is hopelessly queenless. There are many ways 

 of introducing new queens. Of course, the situation is absolutely new and 

 strange in the experience of bees. They have no behavior pattern for such 

 a situation. It can only call out some kind of behavior that has been de- 

 veloped for some other circumstances. 



Sometimes in adding a new queen to a queenless colony this colony is 

 joined with another. Now there are only two natural situations where a 

 large number of bees enter a colony: First, where a swarm settles in a hole 

 that is already occupied; in this case there is a strange queen as well as 

 strange bees — hence some of the behavior towards strange queens. And, 

 secondly, where the strangers come in to rob and carry off honey. In 

 either case, the rightful owners do all in their power to drive off and kill 

 the invaders. This, then, is the natural reaction when two colonies are 

 united. Last summer I put a small group with a bigger one, and next day 

 the ground in front of the hive was littered with dead bees. Apparently 

 every stranger was killed. To obviate this difficulty, some beekeepers turn 

 in a quart or two of strange bees into the hive and then sprinkle in a quart 

 or so of water. The water changes the type of reaction. One old man tells 

 me: "Oh, no trouble at all. If they get to fighting, just get a spoonful of 

 flour and dust it into the hive all over the bees. Then they get so busy clean- 

 ing each other off that they forget all about their quarrel." Why does it 

 work? 



I have spoken of the bee as a combination of hereditary structures and 

 behaviors. But it must be remembered that the parents of worker bees are 

 drones and queens, and these parents do not have the characteristic struc- 

 tures nor the industrious or warlike habits of workers. How can workers 

 inherit characteristics which their parents do not possess? Only, as some 

 wag said, by inheriting from their maiden aunts. 



While this inheritance has been considered a problem, it is really not 

 so. Or, rather, it is a commonplace problem, and part of all considerations 

 of heredity. Bees are improved by breeding from those queens whose off- 

 spring are most productive and least irritable. And nature too has certainly 

 bred from those queens whose offspring best fitted themselves to their 

 surroundings. 



It is very easy for me to believe that the bee is a kind of automaton — a 

 complex of physico-chemical reactions bound by and leading to a com- 

 plex of behavior patterns — and that all is dependent on the nature of the 

 materials and forces of our world and the million-year-old inherited ex- 

 perience of bees. But if that conception of the bee is true, what am I? If 



