552 Mr. John Lowe’s Observations on 
sion of purity as regards the queen and drone, I 
confess my inability, according to my experience, to 
determine on all occasions the perfect purity of 
either. 
I failed, therefore, with the aid of the Italian bee, to 
expiscate the truth of Dzierzon’s assertion, that, in the 
case of hybridized queens, the drone offspring always 
follow the race of the mother. 
In July, 1865, Mr. Woodbury imported from Germany 
a queen and a few bees of the Hgyptian race, Apis fasciata. 
In the following spring he wrote to me to say, that as 
Apis fasciata was decidedly more irascible than Apis ligust- 
ica, and as he could not well propagate both races, he had 
made up his mind to “ stick to his first love,” and there- 
fore offered the original colony of A. fasciata tome. I 
gladly availed myself of this offer, and upon the 7th of 
June, 1866, the colony reached me in comparative safety. 
Jimmediately set to work to propagate the Egyptian race. 
I succeeded in raising twelve queens during the summer 
and autumn. Seven of these were fertilized, and became 
the heads of so many colonies. Three disappeared, and 
one was encased and killed. Two which I raised to- 
wards the end of August, in consequence of the very 
untoward weather which followed, failed, apparently, te 
get impregnated, and they became drone-breeders. The 
drones produced by these, being bred in worker-cells, 
formed no true test of purity, as in such circum- 
stances they are generally darker in colour; but they 
appeared pretty well marked. I never witnessed either 
of these queens come out, or take what is termed the 
‘‘ wedding flight,” (the weather being very unfavour- 
able,) although they might have done so without my 
knowledge. There were Egyptian drones at the time in 
the apiary, and also in the hives in which the young 
queens were reared. One of these produced drones 
towards the close of the season, the other early during 
the spring of 1867. 
It is proper that I should here state, that I reared all 
the Egyptian queens in proximity to my Italians. I 
had no English bees in my apiary, but I am not suffi- 
ciently removed from other apiaries to be beyond 
English drone-influence. 
Of the respective progenies of the young Egyptian 
queens, those of two only were similar to the parent 
colony, though these, too, differed a shade. The bees 
