Parthenogenesis amongst Workers of Cave Honey-Bee. 401 



the experimental hives, and yet in the queenless colony an 

 abundant production of workers of the Cape variety con- 

 tinued, and only a small proportion of undersized drones 

 appeared. Even had Cape bees been abundant near by 

 it is impossible to imagine that some hundreds of eggs 

 were stolen. 



The question now remained as to whether these Cape 

 workers could possibly have been fertilised. During the 

 course of the experiment the writer had dissected a small 

 number only of the Cape laying workers, examining the 

 spermathecae under the microscope. The examination 

 was checked by the dissection of a fertile and an unfertilised 

 Rhodesian queen. The spermatheca was placed in saline 

 solution on a slide and crushed under the cover glass. In 

 the case of the fertilised queen, of course, myriads of sper- 

 matozoa were at once apparent. The spermathecae of the 

 Cape workers, however, contained nothing but a jelly-like 

 substance, which agreed on a smaller scale with the contents 

 of the sperm sac in an unfertilised queen. 



On request, Mr. Onions supplied a number of Cape 

 workers from his apiary, which were found to contain 

 eggs but no spermatozoa, but it was obvious that there 

 was no certainty that these eggs were destined to produce 

 workers, so that the dissections were of comparatively 

 little value. A third experiment was therefore under- 

 taken, and this served not only to prove that the Cape 

 laying workers contained no spermatozoa, whilst producing 

 worker bees, but also furnished a corroboration of both 

 the other experiments. 



On March 23rd Mr. Onions set up a new hive at the 

 Experiment Station, giving its history as follows : — 



On February 24th a hive of Rhodesian bees was " de- 

 queened " and given a frame of Cape brood (from a queen). 

 Two queen cells were matured — one of these was removed 

 and one allowed to hatch. This hatched in due course, 

 but on March 22nd the queen was found to be missing and 

 Cape fertile workers strongly in evidence. The hive was 

 examined by the writer and found to contain no queen. 

 Three or four normal-sized Italian drones were present 

 and many eggs, and some brood were present in the brood 

 comb. These, of course, might possibly have been laid 

 by the Cape queen, but this, as will be seen, did not affect 

 the experiment in any way. A large number of black 



