8o8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



with the outside world, and doubtless with more wisdom and less 

 conceit. 



The third and last rightful denizen of a perfect colony of bees is 

 the unsophisticated, stingless, but much abused drone — the male bee. 

 He is well named, however, being a very liberal feeder with excellent 

 digestive organs for honey, and with no duties whatever within the 

 hive further than the incidental one of contributing by the presence 

 of his cumbrous corporation to the animal heat of the hive. As to 

 his natural longevity, nobody from Virgil to Huber, Langstroth, 

 Quinby, Newman, Cook, Jones, et alii, seems to know much about it. 

 The matter not being invested with any importance, no investigator 

 seems to have bothered his head much with it. So far as I could ever 

 see, the drone seems to live and thrive admirably until he is either 

 killed off by the workers, starved to death, or gallantly yields up his 

 life in performing his sole function, which he invariably does in the 

 performance of this function in the act of coj^ulation. The drone, as 

 Dr. Dzeirzon established, comes from an unimpregnated egg — the 

 virgin queen, and sometimes even workers, being able to lay eggs 

 which will produce drones. As a rule, drones are found in colonies 

 whenever they are needed, or likely to be needed to impregnate the 

 young queens, which is usually during the swarming season and honey- 

 harvest. Though they ai-e promptly ejected from strong colonies 

 when not needed, and the honey-flow fails, they are tolerated in 

 queenless colonies, and are sometimes wintered over. The drone is 

 much larger than the worker, and his cell very protuberant, and in it 

 he spends twenty-four days from the egg before he emerges. 



As remarked at the outset, bee-culture made but little progress on 

 scientific principles for thousands of years. It is only within the last 

 half-century or so that it has, under the magical talisman of science, 

 fairly leaped forward like eveiy other pursuit. The first great achieve- 

 ment was the application of the centrifugal force in the construction 

 of the honey-extractor, thus enabling us to get the honey in its purity 

 out of the comb without injuring the latter, when it can be returned to 

 the bees to be refilled. A German (Herr von Aruschka) accomplished 

 this, and thereby gave a great impetus to bee-culture. Indeed, the 

 invention of the onovahle frame and the honey -extractor completely 

 revolutionized the modus operandi of bee-keeping. As to who is really 

 entitled to the credit of inventing the movable frame, there is some 

 uncertainty and a conflict of claims. The truth seems to be that some 

 three or four different persons are fairly entitled to credit — each, it 

 would appear, having conceived and developed the idea, more or less 

 independently of the others. Huber and Schmidt in Germany, Munn 

 in England, M. de Beauvoys in France, and Langstroth in the United 

 States, are all fairly though not equally entitled to credit, and each 

 has placed progressive bee-culture under tribute. Mr. Langstroth, 

 however, seems entitled to much more credit than any of the others. 



