GENERAL ZOOLOGY 



storage as honey and beebread, tend and feed the young, care for the queen, 

 and are in general responsible for the maintenance of the organization. The 

 queen, having once been inseminated, produces zygotes from which develop 

 all the individuals of the colony. The males, or drones, develop from un- 

 fertilized, haploid eggs through parthenogenesis. The fertilized eggs produce 

 larvae which are always females but which may develop into either sterile 

 workers or fertile young queens, depending on the diet with which they are 

 fed. Future queens are fed throughout larval life on "royal jelly," which 

 permits full development of their genital organs. Other female larvae receive 

 this diet only for a day or two; their genital organs fail to develop, and such 

 physiologically castrate females become workers. There is some evidence indi- 

 cating that workers in a colony obtain some secretion from their queen which 

 generally suppresses the production of additional queens (cf. caste production 

 in termites, pp. 458-459). The integrity of a colony with its single queen is 

 thus maintained until the swarming period, when many workers leave the 

 colony with the old queen, to found a new colony and build a new hive. 

 When this happens, a part of the old colony is left behind to rear a new 

 queen. The behavior of the individuals is a marvel of precision and seeming 

 adaptation of means to ends, although it consists of reactions based on in- 

 herited reflexes, or instincts, which are modifiable only within very narrow 

 limits. In addition to these innate complex behavior patterns, other phenom- 

 ena of the life of the bee are of interest and remain to be accounted for. For 

 example, how is it possible to explain the origin and inheritance of the highly 

 specialized structural modifications of the workers? The legs of these insects 

 bear specifically developed combs, pollen baskets, antenna cleaners, and so 

 on, perfectly adapted to the food-gathering and other functions of the workers 

 (Fig. 15.36); yet the workers are sterile and never produce ofTspring which 

 could inherit these traits, and the queen and the drone, which are the parents 

 of the workers, bear none of these specialized structures. The factors operat- 

 ing within the body of the queen, which evoke the production of either 

 fertilized eggs or parthenogenetic eggs, and thus either female or male 

 progeny, are also unaccounted for. 



Only within recent years has some insight been gained into the means of 

 communication between bees in a colony. Foraging scouts, when they have 

 located a source of food, return to the hive and transmit to other workers 

 information about the kind of food available, its abundance, and the distance 

 and direction from the hive to the food supply. The kind of food, that is, 

 generally the kind of flower from which it may be obtained, is communicated 

 by both olfaction and taste. Other workers gather about the returning scout 

 and "smell" with their antennae the characteristic fragrance of the flowers 

 which clings to its body; similar information is transmitted with the nectar 

 which the scout regurgitates from its honey stomach and which other workers 

 ingest. Bees are capable of distinguishing large numbers of fragrant essential 

 oils from flowers; they are confused by some which also smell alike to man. 

 The distance-and-direction information is transmitted by a series of "dances" 



472 



