56 AUSTRALIAN BEE LORE AND BEE CULTURE- 



large portion of his time in the dark, have a far keener power 

 of vision than either female. Bees have both simple and com- 

 pound eyes. The compound eyes of a queen bee have 4,920 facets, 

 she having to spend the largest portion of her time in the dark. 

 The compound eyes of a worker, who has to spend most of her 

 time in the open air, have 6,300 facets ; but those of a drone, 

 although he spends most of his time in the hive, contain 13,090 

 facets, or nearly three times the number of a queen, and more 

 than double the quantity of the worker ; therefore, his power of 

 sight must be far greater than that of the other sexes of the hive. 

 Why has Nature endowed him with these superior aids to sight, 

 to smell, and to locomotion? His paternal duties are always con- 

 summated in mid-air. The race is to the swift and fight to the 

 strong. The fleetest, the most dexterous, and the strongest are 

 the successful competitors in the matrimonial race when the virgin 

 queen is on the wing. That is why "in the heat of the day he 

 flieth al ■ id, aloft, and about, and that with no small noise." 

 Drones ara stingless ; their abdomen is made up of seven belts, 

 and each belt is composed of two plates — a dorsal and a ventral — 

 the former being the larger, and overlaps the ventral on the lower 

 side of the body. In queen and worker the abdomen has only 

 six belts. 



To sum up, the chief external anatomical differences of drones 

 are, as compared with the workers, larger eyes, larger wings, 

 larger body, longer antennae, an extra belt to the abdomen, and 

 an absence of sting, wax pockets, and pollen baskets. 



The life-history of drone bees is a very short one, and, apart 

 from the other inmates of the hive, is not interesting to the bee- 

 keeper, but to the scientist it is fraught with the deepest interest, 

 and is full of scope for research. The Parthenogenical production 

 of male bees; workers becoming fertile without copulation, and 

 producing drones only ; queens that have failed in their wedding 

 flight to meet with a consort, or that in their development or in 

 maidenhood have been deprived of the power of flight, also become 

 fertile without copulation, but such fertility is confined to the 

 production of male bees only; that they are rarely produced by a 

 queen in the full vigour of youth, health, and strength, etc., but 

 are always produced as the queen advances in age — the older the 

 queen the greater the abundance of males in the hive. These are 

 subjects in connection with the "inmates of the hive" that I shall 

 deal with later on. 



