OR, MANUAL OF THE APIARY. 141 



sealed up, is fed to them. The chyle and larval food he finds 

 to contain blood corpuscles, and he thinks them identical with 

 the same in the blood of the bee. Schonfeld fed indigestible 

 material like iron particles to starving bees that had brood. 

 The chyle, the larval food, but not the blood of the nurse-bees 

 contained this iron. This food of the larvae then must be chyle 

 and not a secretion. I confirmed this by feeding bees sugar 

 syrup in which I mixed finely pulverized charcoal. The char- 

 coal appeared in the royal jelly in the queen-cells. As the 

 charcoal is utterly non-osmotic, it could not pass to the blood, 

 and so could not appear in any secretion, but could and would 

 be in any regurgitated food. This secretion then appears to 

 answer to the gastric juice in our own digestion. Again, the 

 fact that it is acid, makes this conclusion more than war- 

 ranted. This experiment certainly settles the matter. 



Again, these same lower head-glands are found in some 

 insects that do not feed their larvae at all, as species of Eris- 

 talis — wasp-colored two-winged flies— and of Nepa, a genus of 

 water-bugs. 



Dr. Planta and others have shown that the chyle fed to 

 queen-larvae is not the same as that fed to drone-larvae, nor yet 

 like that fed to worker-larvae. If this is chyle the difference 

 could be explained, as it would arise from variation of food. 

 If a secretion, it could not be easily explained. This view is 

 adopted by Mr. Cowan, the ablest and most learned British 

 authority on bees. Bordas has found two other pairs of 

 glands in both worker and drone bees, which he terms, from 

 their position, the internal mandibular and sublingual. It 

 would be interesting but difficult to determine what secretion, 

 if not all the secretions, aided in kneading the wax. 



As in our own development, so in the embryo bee, the mid- 

 intestine arises from the endoderm or inner layer of the initial 

 animal. As the ectoderm or outer layer is around this, not 

 only the mouth and vent, but the fore and hind intestine — all 

 but the true stomach — arise by absorption at these points, or 

 from invagination (a turning in) of the outer layer. Infants 

 are not infrequently born with an imperforate anus. In such 

 cases there is an arrest, the absorption does not take place, 

 and the surgeon's knife comes to Nature's relief. Strangely 



