THE AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL. 



147 



Italian drones, and consequent various sorts of 

 pure Itivlian rin;i;.stroakc'd Avorlcers. But as here 

 we enter upon i()rl)iil(len f;:roun(l, I will suspend 

 further remarks uiuler this head till JMr. Grimm 

 has sold his purely impregnated, pure Italian, 

 colored queens, lest he accuse me again of hav- 

 ing d(!rived all my knowledge about this matter 

 fnnn half a dozen well marked pure queens, and 

 about half a dozen more of their daughters. Suc- 

 cess to you, brother Grimm, but please don't 

 ask me to exchange one of my Langstroth queens 

 for a pure Italian just imported. F. Vauro. 



[For the American Bee Journal.] 



A New Theory. 



How docs a queen bee lay drone eggs in drone 

 cells, and worker egg6 in worker cells? 



Dzicrzon saj'S the queen possesses the ability 

 to lay male or female eggs at pleasiu'c, as the 

 particular cell she is at any time supplying may 

 require. 



Mr. Wagner's theory is that the width of the 

 cell determines the kind of egg deposited, the 

 drone cell allowing the egg to pass out unim- 

 pregnated, Avhercas the narrower worker cell 

 c.iuses a compression of the queen's abdomen 

 and a discharge of the seminal fluid from the 

 spermatheca, sufficient to impregnate the egg 

 and produce a worker bee. When it was ob- 

 jected to this theory that the queen could lay 

 worker eggs in cells not more than an eighth of 

 an inch in depth, and which, therefore, could 

 not compress the queen's abdomen, Mr. Quinby 

 suggested in support of this theory that, ])erhaps, 

 atllie moment of laying, the contents of the ab- 

 domen were crowded down to, such a degree as 

 to touch the sides of a worker cell, even not 

 more than an eighth of an inch in depth. 



Prof. Varro in the December number of the 

 Bee Jocrnal, advances a new theory, which 

 may be called in brief the theory of voluntary 

 contractility. This theory gives the mother bee 

 power to ]")roduce male or female offspring at 

 will, merely by an effort of contraction, or the 

 omission of such an effort. It may be the true 

 theorj% but it does not seem to me to differ much 

 from Dzierzon's; it rather expands or explains 

 his. If this theory be true the mother bee has a 

 power over her offspring not possessed by any 

 other individual in the animal kingdom, from the 

 lowest species up to man himself. Such a theory 

 seems to imply a train of thought in the queen's 

 mind at the laying of every egg somewhat as 

 follows: The queen coming to a worker cell 

 says to herself, "here is a worker cell; in this I 

 will have a daughter," and forthwith giving a 

 little sqeeze in some direction, the thing is done. 

 Passing to a drone c?ll, she says to herself, "lo, 

 here is a drone cell, in this I will have a son," 

 and depositing an egg without the little squeeze, 

 her will is accomplished. In busy times when 

 laying two or three thousand eggs per day, she 

 would be obliged to omit most of the above, and 

 content herself with the main idea, which could | 

 not in a single instance be omitted without lia- 

 bility to mistake, viz : "son," "daughter," | 

 "daughter," "son," and so on to the end of the . 

 busy season, as she came upon one or the other i 

 kind of cell. 



It is generally conceded that the Dzierzon 



theory of rei)roduetion in bees is true in this, 

 viz: that drone eggs are laid unimpregnated, 

 and that eggs producing workers and (iueena 

 are impregnated at tlic time of laying from the 

 seminal fluid contained in a sac, situated near 

 the extremity of the abdomen and connected 

 with the oviduct by a long and narrow channel 

 or duct. This sac is readily found by the naked 

 eye in any dissected queen. Its contents if 

 taken from a fertile queen and crushed upon the 

 thumb-nail with a knife blade, appears milky 

 white; if submitted to microscopic examination 

 and compared with the seminal fluid taken di- 

 rectly from a drone, it appears identical with 

 that. Seminal fllaments or spermatozoa, pre- 

 cisely like those found in a fertile queen's semi- 

 nal sac, and in a drone's semen, have been dis- 

 covered by the microscope in worker eggs, and 

 their absence in drone eggs has been as clearly 

 proved by the same means. The question now 

 i?, why are they, or how are they present in one 

 and not in tiie other? or how can a queen im- 

 pregnate every worker ogg and avoid impreg- 

 nating every drone egg without making a single 

 mistake? Can it be e'xplained without assigning 

 to a queen bee a power of judgment, inemory, 

 will, and general intelligence far above thatpos- 

 sessed by the whole remaining catalogue of ani- 

 male beings? To be sure, it will make but little 

 difference to practical bee-keepers whether this 

 question is ever settled. Still, it is rather inter- 

 esting, and indeed, if my new theory is correct, 

 it may lead to an easy method of lessening the 

 amount of drones produced in any hive. The 

 new theory, in brief, is this: "the depth of the 

 cell determines the kind of egg." An ordinary 

 fertile queen can lay impregnated eggs in any 

 cell, from the depth of an eighth of an inch to 

 the full depth of a worker brood cell. Any per- 

 son who has seen a queen in the act of laying 

 (and any one may do this in the height of the 

 breeding season, by taking out the comb on 

 which the queen is and holding it for a few min- 

 utes,) must have noticed that her abdomen near- 

 ly disappears, even in a worker cell, and that 

 her position seems to be very awkward and diffi- 

 cult to maintain while in the cell. 1 have never 

 seen a queen laying in a drone cell, but from its 

 greater depth, it must of course be still more 

 difficult for the queen lo reaph the bottom of it 

 to deposit an egg. Now, perhaps, this very dif- 

 ficulty of reaching the bottom of so deep a cell, 

 may cause such an elongation of the abdomen of 

 the queen as so close involuntarilj- the mouth of 

 the duct to the seminal sac, and hence prevent 

 the egg from being impregnated. I have never 

 known a queen to lay in drone comb of less than 

 the full depth. I do not know of any facts that 

 this theory does not exjilain. It is simple and 

 does away with the necessity of attributing such 

 unusual pliysical and mental powers to the queen 

 bee. Does it not explain the result of the laying 

 of I\[r. Quinby's very small queen mentioned on 

 page 115, Bi-E Jot-'rxal for December? She 

 could reach the bottom of the shallow or unfin- 

 ished worker cells with fertilized eggs, but the 

 effort to reach the bottom of the full-sized cells 

 was too great, the duct was closed, the egg was 



