iTHE mw^mmicmn mmn j&urjs,ik.il. 



759 





I trust that no one will jeopardize 

 our rights and privileges to send queen- 

 bees in the mail, by presuming to send 

 a working eolony — even tliough it does 

 not weigli four pounds — for the pur- 

 pose of saving a few cents of express 

 charges, or other trilling inconven- 

 ience. I hope that the Manager of the 

 Bee-Keepers" Union will not fail to 

 cast his advice in the direction of pru- 

 dence and judicious management of 

 this matter. 



Abronia, Mich. 



[We gave our " advice " over a 

 month ago. We fully agree with the 

 position taken by friend Bingham, as 

 will be seen by re-reading our editorial 

 on page G76. — Ed.] 



HEREDITY. 



An Important Di§CHSsion 

 Heredity in Bees. 



Read at tlie Britieh Bee-Keepers' Convention 

 BY MR. K. A. GRIMSHAW. 



Are we to assume that the most so- 

 cial of all insects has developed into 

 its present high condition from ances- 

 tors who have had less and less of the 

 social instinct in them as we go back 

 into the remote past, age by age, until 

 we find a seemingly perfect solitai'y 

 honey-bee, (jueen and drone, male and 

 female, themselves workers, able to 

 gather their own food, as in the case 

 of the queen humble-bee, able to se- 

 crete wax and rear its young until the 

 progeny becoming numerous, take 

 these duties upon themselves ? If so, 

 in vast spaces of time, the necessity of 

 honey-gathering and wax-secreting, 

 the part of the queen being removed, 

 the organs and glands used for this 

 purpose would by disuse become 

 aborted and atrophied, the tongue 

 would get shorter by degrees until it 

 became, as we find it to-day, too short 

 altogether for the purpose of gather- 

 ing nectar from flowers, and the wax- 

 .secreting glands would disappear en- 

 tirely', the pollen-baskets would also 

 for the same reason go by the board, 

 or remain only in a rudimentary form. 



The reproductive organs would re- 

 main, of course, as perfect as we find 

 them, and by the whole energies of 

 the queen being devoted to egg-laying, 

 the ovaries would be developed into 

 the vast egg-producing organs we 

 know them to be. 



On tlie part of the worker (a female 

 Ijee), the necessity for its participation 

 in the re-peopling of the hive Ijeing re- 

 moved, the requisite organs would at 

 the same rate become atrophied, as 

 we find them, whilst the constant and 

 increased use of other parts (the 



tongue and the pollen-baskets), would 

 be gradually developed under the 

 marvellous loss of compensation, into 

 what we see they are in the present 

 stage of their development. The fact 

 of certain varieties of A2>if! mcllifica 

 having longer tongues than otliers, 

 would support the suggestion that our 

 bees are not jet on the apex of perfec- 

 tion, as regards the development of 

 the parts necessary for nectar-gather- 

 ing. Other varietal difl'erences also 

 strengthen the assumption. 



The development of the social idea 

 always brings with it specialization of 

 parts, devotion to special labor, and 

 the division of work. Thus we find 

 the probational nursing-period, and its 

 following honey- and-pollen- gathering 

 life, with the divisions of labor into 

 cell-building, wax-secreting, water- 

 carrying, sentinel works, and so on. 



Now the question forces itself upon 

 us — how and by what means are all 

 these specializations handed down to 

 the generations ? The queen ixr se 

 has only the re-peopling instinct to 

 ti'ansmit, which she does in the worker 

 and drone eggs, the worker-bees hav- 

 ing certainly as strong desire to keep 

 up the strength of the huge colony as 

 the queen can have — perhaps more so ; 

 but she (the queen) inherits nothing 

 from her parents beyound the faculty 

 of depositing eggs by the thousand. 

 She inherits no instinct for mutual de- 

 fense, the necessity of seeking food, 

 building cells, etc., neither can she 

 transmit these instincts, for neither the 

 queen nor the drone have the power of 

 handing down to posterity something 

 they do not possess. 



The truly wondrous developments 

 of various instincts in the worker-bee 

 are not possessed by the parent bees ; 

 and as these developments must have 

 extended over enormous periods of 

 time, in order, little by little, by con- 

 stant use, to reach their present pitch 

 of perfection, these minute advances of 

 the worker must have been perpetuated 

 by some means for the benefit of her 

 successors in the hives of the future. 



The queen-bee is more the daughter 

 of her nurses than the daughter of her 

 mother, for, we know, it is only by the 

 changed treatment of a worker-egg by 

 the worker-bees, tliat she becomes a 

 queen at all. The queen can only lay 

 queen-eggs and drone-eggs, no worker- 

 eggs, only perfect male or female ova ; 

 it is tlie treatment the female eggs re- 

 ceive at the hands of the workers 

 which decides the future line of useful- 

 ness in the female progen}-. How, 

 then, can any characteristic developed 

 in the worker be transmitted other 

 tlian by tlie food fed to the brood out 

 of the digestive organs of the worker- 

 bee herself — food, perhaps, contamin- 

 ated l)y the germs of foul brood, by 



having passed through the worker's 

 own diseased system, but food as much 

 characteristic of the nurse-bee as is the 

 milk of a nurse-mother — a foster- 

 mother — amongst tlie mammalia ? 



We have, then, only this dilemma to 

 face : Peculiarities of the worker-bee 

 not possessed by either of its parents 

 must be handed down somehow by it- 

 self ; and there seems to be no way of 

 the dilliculty other tlian by assuming 

 that she does this in the manner I sug- 

 gest. If you insist that these are latent 

 in the worker-egg as soon as laid, quite 

 irrespective of any hereditary tendency 

 hamled down in the worker-brood 

 food, then I contend that even in this 

 case the queen-mother inherited these 

 tendencies in the so-called royal jelly, 

 on which she fed when in the grub 

 state, but still a brood^food which had 

 passed through the system of wcjrkers. 

 The same argument applies also to in- 

 heritance through the drone. 



Ribot tells us, " In animals the trans- 

 mission of individual character is a 

 fact .so common as scarcely to need 

 illustration ;" and Darwin supports 

 him by instancing that " if ahorse be 

 trained to certain paces, the colt in- 

 herits similar movements ; the dog be- 

 comes intelligent from associating with 

 man ; the retriever is taught to fetch 

 and carry ; and these mental endow- 

 ments and bodilj- powers are all in- 

 herited." He also lays down the axiom 

 that " variability results generally 

 from changed conditions acting during 

 successive generations." Therefore I 

 hold that our worker-bee has gradually 

 developed its social instincts, and the 

 well-known distinctive peculiarities it 

 possesses, through multitudes of gen- 

 erations, adapting themselves to 

 changed conditions of life, inheriting 

 and handing down distinct instincts 

 where fully developed ; but where only 

 partially developed, handing down a 

 tendency in a given direction. 



It may be doubted that brood food 

 (the sustenance of a foster-mother) is 

 capable of transmitting such tenden- 

 cies. I think that we only need to re- 

 flect a short time and we shall be pre- 

 pared to admit the theory of heredity 

 Ijj' generations of specialized food. 

 Darwin assists us again by telling us, 

 "Each living creature must be looked 

 upon as a microcosm, a little universe, 

 formed of a host of self-propagating 

 or"-anisms, inconceivably minute, and 

 as numerous as the stars in heaven. 

 These organic units, besides having the 

 power, as is generally admitted, of 

 crowing by self-division, throw oft" free 

 and minute atoms of their contents — 

 that is, gcmmules. .. .Their develop- 

 ment depends on their own union with 

 other nascent cells or units, and they 

 are capable of transmission in a dor- 

 mant state to successive generations." 



