AUSTRALASIAN BEE MANUAL 17 



were made in the knowledge of the physiology of the 

 bee. It is said that Janscha, apiarist to the Empress 

 Maria Theresa of Austria, discovered the fact that 

 young queens have to leave the hive to meet the 

 drones; but it is to the labours of Huber, in 1787 and 

 following years, and communicated in his letters 

 addressed to Bonnet in the years 1789 to 1791, that 

 we owe the first knowledge of the following main 

 facts : — I. That the queen bee is truly oviparous; that 

 what she deposits is a true egg, which takes three days 

 to produce a living maggot or larva — (even the great 

 Bonnet was inclined up to that time to believe that a 

 minute worm, and not an egg, was produced by the 

 queen). 2. That the queen must be impregnated by 

 the drone in order to become fertile. 3. That copula- 

 tion is accomplished outside the hive and while on the 

 wing high in the air. 4. That one impregnation was 

 sufficient to fertilise all the eggs laid by the queen 

 subsequently for two years at least, perhaps for life. 

 5. But that if the act of impregnation was delayed 

 beyond the twenty-first day of the queen's life, her eggs 

 would afterwards produce only drones. Huber also 

 proved that queens could be reared from the larvae of 

 worker eggs, and also that in some rare cases workers 

 were able to lay eggs, which, however, could only 

 produce drones. He investigated other matters of the 

 greatest importance to the science of bee-culture, and 

 was gratefully designated The Prince of Apiculturists 

 by Langstroth. He failed, however, to discover the 

 secrets of the spermatheca, and remained under the 

 false impression that the fertilisation of the eggs took 

 place in the ovaries and that there were two kinds of 

 eggs, one sort to produce workers and queens, the 

 other to produce drones, and that they occupied 

 separate portions of the ovaries. His contemporary, 

 Schirach, who also contributed much to apiarian 

 science, supposed that one branch of the ovaries con- 

 tained the one kind and the second branch the other 

 kind of fertilised eggs. In this state the science 

 remained for some sixty years. Langstroth said it is 

 now ascertained that Posel, in a work published at 



