160 



The Journal of Heredity 



supply, is the price demanded, making a 

 truly desirable doe, instead of the "poor 

 man's cow," the "rich man's luxury." 



Richly pedigreed, tested does com- 

 mand figures running well up into the 

 hundreds, the record price having been 

 set at the Liberty Fair in Los Angeles, 

 California, the first days of the present 

 year, in the sale of the Toggenburg, 

 Princess Louise, No. 739 A.M.G.A., 

 yielding 634 quarts of milk in twenty- 

 four hours, and producing fourteen 

 kids in her four kiddings, for $700. 



Fairly good producing grades sell for 

 from $50 to $75, while top males bring 

 from $200 to the record of $1,000. 

 Lower grades, and young untried things, 

 are vended all the way from $25 down 

 to the price of market stock. 



Such a state of affairs affords an 

 attractive opportunity for progressive 

 spirits to engage in the enterprise of 

 breeding, handling and perfecting milk 

 goats, up to the unlimited possibilities 

 clearly attainable. 



Hermaphrodite Bees 



One of the beekeepers in this district 

 has just been telling me of a further de- 

 velopment of the unusual experience he 

 had with one of his colonies in 1917. 

 During that year, and again in 1918, 

 large numbers of malformed bees were 

 thrown out of one of his hives. On mak- 

 ing an examination of these bees as many 

 as thirteen distinct and curious combina- 

 tions were observed. Some of them had 

 a worker eye on the left side of the head 

 and a drone eye on the other, and some 

 just the reverse. Others were per- 

 fectly formed drones as far as the 

 petiole (the tube connecting the thorax 

 with the abdomen), the abdomens from 

 that point being in every way the same 

 as workers, including the sting. Others 

 again were just the reverse of this. These 

 monstrosities all emerged from worker 

 cells which were capped in such a pecu- 

 liar manner that they could all be 



recognized before hatching out. There 

 was apparently nothing radically amiss 

 with the queen otherwise as the colony 

 built up rapidly in the spring and 

 swarmed early in the season. At this 

 time five nuclei were made from the 

 hive and now comes the remarkable and 

 strange part of the story. All these 

 nuclei have repeated the same pheno- 

 mena as the parent colony, similar types 

 of malformed bees having been thrown 

 out of every one. Here, therefore is 

 direct evidence of a well defined, al- 

 though undesirable, trait, or charac- 

 teristic, in a queen being transmitted 

 to her next succeeding generation. A 

 theory advanced, when the occurrence 

 was first observed in 1917, was that pos- 

 sibly the old queen might have been 

 mated with a drone emanating from a 

 laying worker. — W. J. Sheppard, Nel- 

 son, B. C, in British Columbia Farmer. 



Families of the First-Bom 



Analyzing more than 20,000 individ- 

 ual histories in five American genealo- 

 gies, Carl E. Jones ( Quarterly Pubs., 

 Am. Stat. Ass'n, December, 1918), 

 finds that the first-born marry in the 

 same proportion as other members of 

 their families, and that when they marry 

 they have on the average just as many 

 children as do their sibs. He infers that, 

 whatever the handicaps may be under 



which the first-born is alleged to labor, 

 these handicaps are not of a character 

 to interfere with his racial value. Mr. 

 Jones extracts from his data a number 

 of other conclusions, most of which are 

 confirmatory of those secured by Alex- 

 ander Graham Bell in his study of the 

 Hyde family, parts of which have been 

 presented in various issues of the Jour- 

 nal OF Heredity. 



