THE AMERICAN APICULTURIST. 



107 



Their sexual marks however must 

 be indescribably small, or proba- 

 bly altogether extinguished ; else 

 the great Dutch naturalist and dis- 

 sector Swammerdam, wlio has so 

 admirably described and illustra- 

 ted the ovaria of the queens, and 

 Maraldi and Reaumur, would have 

 discovered them. Concerning the 

 development of the sexual organs, 

 it depends mainly upon a certain 



peculiar kind of nourishment, and 

 upon a cell, where they have space 

 enough to expand in every direc- 

 tion ; in default of these two essen- 

 tial conditions, the common bee is 

 condemned to eternal virginity or 

 rather sterility, so that they all are 

 truly females, but a peculiar kind 

 of females, which do not and can- 

 not have any issue, females which 

 at present are not such, but which 



frames, and in his Fundamental Laws of a 

 perennial colony, pages 7(i and 153, lie asserts, 

 that the common workers produce only 

 drones. But just as little as Mr. Bonnet has 

 seen a worker lay eggs in his glass hives, as 

 little could I ever see any which were laying 

 eggs, although I have often and again seen 

 the queen laying eggs, even drone eggs. 



A new experience which belongs here, has 

 been publislied by Pastor Hanidor in the 

 Gotha Weekly for Useful Knowledge, Nos. 

 XX and xxi of 1782. Jn several hivi^s he dis- 

 covered drone-queens, which the workers, 

 probably from the lack of proper brood, and 

 perhaps in consequence of the death of the 

 real queen, had raised out of drone-brood, and 

 this in the same manner as they usually raised 

 a genuine queen; they built a royal cell 

 around a drone-pupa, gave it probably the 

 royal food, and thus raised queens, which had 

 the head, chest and the whole body of the 

 same form with tlie other drones, but were 

 more considerable, lai-ger and of a more bril- 

 liant color than the latter. Rev. Ramdor has 

 indeed not dissected those drone-queens in 

 order to examine their internal strurture, and 

 to prove their equality with tiie drones, winch 

 is very much to be regretted. It is, however, 

 very probable, and may reasonably be as- 

 sumed, that these drone-queens were of tlie 

 male sex. But since only drones had been 

 produced in these hives. 'he means to solve 

 the problem of drone-production by assum- 

 ing that some of the workers must be able to 

 lay drone-eggs. He supposes even, that 

 they tlo it not only in queenless hives, but also 

 in good, strong ones, and tliat. to this be- 

 hoof, they were, like the queens, impregnated 

 by the drones, whereby also the great quan- 

 tity of drones in a hive could be explained. 



IJut it seems that the itroblem is by no 

 means solveil as yet, and that we cannot sub- 

 scribe to this opinion without a more search- 

 ing investigation and better established 

 experiences. It would imleed be worth tlie 

 while, to closely investigate such a queenless 

 hive witli no other but drone-brood, and to 

 ascertain if there was not among the workers 

 a queen of perhaps equal size, with the work- 

 ers (to which she is generally similar in 

 shape), since the queen nni.-t grow smaller, 

 when the eggs wliirli produce workers have 

 suffered or have iinii;,|i- inr tlie greater part, 

 perished. It would lurtlicr be necessary to 

 dissect all the workers ofihe hive, and to as- 

 certain, if any, and how many are provided 

 with an ovarium, a not very difficult lask, as 

 it must be visijde especially at that time; far- 

 ther, if any of these workers have any marks 

 of a small queen, as for instance, the absence 

 of the spoon or the cavity, and the brush on 



the hind legs, a smaller trunk, a different 

 shape of the feeders (to gather honey with) 

 and teeth, etc. ; and indeed in case that any 

 Avorker, at the time when the hive had no 

 queen, should produce drone-brood, and be 

 impelled by the want of a queen, to transform 

 itself, so to say, to a halfmother,— if such a 

 worker has any marks which the other work- 

 ers do not have, etc. 



The objections and doubts to which the the- 

 ory of Rev. Ramdor is exposed are mainly the 

 following: 



(a) Where in nature is to be found a well- 

 known instance of animals or insects which 

 are able to propagate only one sex of their 

 kind, and never both sexes, male and female, 

 together, since the lirst would be useless, as 

 nature never does? 



(b) Why have the most celebrated dissect- 

 ors never been able to discover in the work- 

 ers the least trace of an ovarium? and why 

 has no observer ever seen a common worker 

 in glass-hives deposit an egg, while we fre- 

 quently observe the queen doing it, and are 

 even able to distinguish whether she depos- 

 its common worker-brood, or drone-brood? 



(c) If the workers should have the faculty 

 and impulse to issue drones while together 

 with tlieir own mother, what an immense 

 number of drones would always exist in the 

 hives, even with a good and sound queen ? 



(d) If the com non workers be able to pro- 

 duce drones or male bees, to issue drone- 

 eggs and thus to furnish germ and seed of this 

 sex, why do they never do so in such seasons, 

 when drones are not existing, as for instance, 

 in early spring, or in the latter part of fall, 

 when they are commonly already extermina- 

 teii, especially as at both these times hives 

 may lose, and often do lose their qneens? 

 and here we must not overlook that in strong 

 colonies new brood is issued already about 

 Christmas, especially in not very cold win- 

 ters. 



As a rule, a naturalist ought to be very cau- 

 tious in his conclusions from the lirst suc- 

 cessful results of his exjieriments, since it is 

 very dilficult to establish the laws and con- 

 ditions on which living beings depend. What 

 seems often to be downright contrary to anal- 

 ogy and the usual course of nature, is not 

 always so. especially with insects. On the 

 other hand we are |)rone to draw conclusions 

 from experiments, before they have been suf- 

 ficiently repeated and carefully examined and 

 varied. Nature has many different ways, and 

 yet reaches the same end. I am, therefore, 

 very incredulous in natural science and can- 

 not give my assent unless I have tried such 

 experiments myself, or know that other nat- 

 uralists of authority have tried them. 



