1873.] 



THE AMERICAl^ BEE JOURNAL. 



119 



North American Bee Keepers' Society. 



A committee from the North American 'Bee 

 Keepers' Society is in personal communication 

 with the superintendents of various railroads 

 for the purpose of securing reduced rates of 

 travel over such roads for those who expect to 

 be present at the convention which has its 

 next session at Louisville, Ky., the first 

 Tuesday in December. "We have .delayed 

 the Journal several days beyond its regular 

 date of issue in order to obtain the report of 

 this committee, from which as we go to press 

 we have received no definite report of their 

 success. We urge upon all those interested 

 in bee culture to be present at the convention. 



Plethoia. 



We have a great press of correspondence on 

 hand, now that bee keepers are beginning to 

 have some leisure. Though we are willing to 

 resign almost the whole of our space to them, 

 even that is insufllcient, and we must ask their 

 kind indulgence and utmost patience. 



[For the American Bee Journal.] 



The " He-Bees."' 



Friend Clark : — In your September Jotjr- 

 NAii you came very near, as you say, indulging 

 in " cussory remarks" over some " He-bees" that 

 came at you about the same time that the she- 

 bees fixed you so you " could not see it" and by 

 way of getting clear of them you hand them 

 over to me. You say : " When we got over our 

 fit of vexation, we began to wonder whether 

 it really was an error after all. We 

 saw that the article was a translation from 

 Bienenzeitung, and knowing how far Germans 

 are ahead of us in the science and art of bee- 

 keeping, didn't know but they had succeeded 

 in producing a species of ' he-bees that would 

 gather honey, &c.'....The 'happy thought' 

 soon had to be dropped, but it occurred to us 

 to commend this point to our advanced and 

 advancing friend Adair . . . Now here is a ' new 

 idea' for him. Let him try his hand on the 

 ' he-bees' and train them to search for honey. 

 It would end all our trouble about drone-comb, 

 multiply our working force very greatly, and 

 the apiarian world would pronounce blessings 

 on the man who invented drone workers. 



I took the matter under advisement, and 

 have been asking myself ever since " why not''' f 

 I find that Von Seibold examined some Italian 

 bees at Constance, Germany, in which the pe- 

 culiarities of the two sexes were singularly 



mixed uj). " The mixture of external charac- 

 ters was manifested sometimes only in the an- 

 terior or posterior part of the body, sometimes 

 in all parts of the body, or only in a few or- 

 gans. Some specimens presented male and 

 worker characters on the two sides of the body. 

 The development of the internal organs were 

 singularly co-related with those peculiarities of 

 external organization." (See Gu7ither's Zoologic- 

 al Review iov 1864) But Siebold says these 

 were hermaphrodites. Suppose they were; are 

 they any more abnormal than the workers that 

 diifer so widely from the perfect queen, or true 

 female? He ascribes their production to the 

 imperfect fecundation of the ovum. That may 

 or may not be so. But do we not see a greater 

 variation produced where fecundation is sup- 

 posed to be perfect ? What causes the tongue 

 and mandibles of the worker to take a differ- 

 ent shape from those of the queen ? the poste- 

 rior tibia to be concave instead of flat ; adds to 

 them the fringe of hairs that forms the pollen- 

 basket, and the auricle and pectu that enables 

 the workers to use their tibia as claspers ; what 

 shortens their abdomens by obliterating one 

 segment ; changes their color ; makes the sting 

 straight instead of curved ; develops the wax 

 pockets, and gives the power of secreting wax ; 

 and so changes the ovaries that they are inca- 

 pable of yielding perfect eggs? 



But more astonishing still, the workers have 

 no instincts common with the queens. Their 

 very passion, tempers and manners (if I may so 

 call them) are different. The imaginative bee- 

 keeper sees in his queen a capacity for love, 

 jealousy and vengeance, and she has no inclina- 

 tion to labor, nor the capacity for it. The 

 worker is exempt from the stimulus of sexual 

 desire, but are incessant in the nurture of the 

 young; are industrious and skillful. They 

 collect honey and pollen ; elaborate wax, and 

 nurture, rear and defend young queens, which 

 the old queen hate, and are said to pursue with 

 the most vindictive fury, even to destruction. 

 Yet these workers are as far from perfect females 

 as the males Siebold saw are from perfect 

 drones, and a worker drone would be no more 

 anomalous than a worker female. 



Just as I reached these conclusions I receiv- 

 ed the October number of the French Journal 

 L' Apiculteur, and 1 find in it a paper read by 

 Mons. E. Drory before the Society of Apicul- 

 ture of the Giraud and Linnaean Society of 

 Bordeaux, France, entitled " New Observations 

 on the Meliponas.'' He finds, in the species 

 urussu mirim, that the workers secrete the wax 

 on all the five dorsal segments of the abdomen, 

 that is, 071 the back instead of under the abdo- 

 men. It is not secreted in " pockets" under 

 the segments, as in our bees, but covers the en- 

 tire back as a skin. Among these bees the 

 drones are smaller than the workers, and "pro- 

 duce also wax on the back like the workers,^^ 

 (" Prodint aussi de la cire sur le dos de la meme 



