THE EMBRYOLOGY OF THE HONEY BEE 9 



chorion and apparently structureless. It is sometimes found ad- 

 hering to the chorion, sometimes to the egg. 



The contents of the egg of insects, as well as of all other ani- 

 mals, is made up, broadly speaking, of two portions, namely : 

 protoplasm — the so-called formative yolk, — the material basis of 

 all life and the part of the ovum immediately concerned in de- 

 velopment ; and deutoplasm, a store of food material destined 

 to be consumed by the developing embryo. In the vast majority 

 of insect eggs the deutoplasm greatly exceeds the protoplasm 

 in amount. 



If an egg of the bee, freshly taken from the comb during the 

 early stages of development, is placed in normal salt solution and 

 crushed slightly so as to rupture the chorion and allow some of 

 the contents of the egg to flow out, examination under the mi- 

 croscope (Fig. 3) will show that these consist of the following 



Fig. 3. Yolk from a living egg, showing vitelline spheres, vitelline 

 bodies, and the minute ref ringent bodies supposed to represent Blochmann's 

 corpuscles, x 600. 



elements: (1) Large transparent spheres of a colorless fluid, 

 10-25 microns in diameter, the vitelline spheres. (2) Small re- 

 fringent bodies, apparently solid, lying within these spheres, the 

 vitelline bodies. Their size is variable, but is about one-sixth the 

 diameter of the spheres ; their form is also variable, rounded to 

 long ovate, best expressed by comparing them to the water worn 

 pebbles of glacial gravel. Their number is approximately the 

 same as that of the spheres. (3) A viscid interstitial substance, 

 the ovarian protoplasm, pale greenish in color, apparently cement- 

 ing the spheres together. (4) Multitudes of very tiny greenish 

 refringent bodies lying within the interstitial substance. These 

 may possibly correspond to the so-called Blochmann's corpuscles 

 found in certain other insects. They are not distributed uni- 



