10 THE BEE-KEF.PERS' REVIEW 



may look forward to something of this kind. In that event it would 

 imdoubtedl}^ be possible to make very considerable modifications 

 in the races of honey bees. 



I do not know whether these points are of any interest to you 

 but if I have not made myself ])erfectly clear I should be glad to 

 write you further. Yours very sincerely, 



W. M. Wheeler. 



[Dr. Bonney's letter to Prof. Newall was along the same lines 

 as the one given above to Prof. AMieeler, so we will not reproduce 

 it here. — Ed.] 



College Station, Texas, Oct. 20, 1911. 

 Dr. A. F. Bonney, Buck Grove, Iowa. 

 Dear Sir: 



I feel honored by the receipt of your letter of the oth instant, 

 and the first thing I must do in replying is to express regret that 

 I cannot give you the information you desire. 



I have been interested in bees all of my life but as to investi- 

 gation of inheritance in the honey bee I have done nothing, so far, 

 other than to study the problem and to plan for a few experiments. 



During this summer I spent two months at the Bussey Institu- 

 tion, Forest Hills, Massachusetts, studying under Prof. Wheeler 

 and under Dr. W. E. Castle, professor of genetics and experimental 

 evolution. The information that I gained there relative to the 

 methods of breeding led me to believe that it is possible to find out 

 what characters in the honey bee are transmitted according to the 

 Mendelian scheme. I will have to determine, first of all, what char- 

 acters of the honey bee are really Mendelian and will thereafter 

 have to find out by experiment just how these characters act in 

 inheritance. Genetics, as you are doubtless already aware, is a sci- 

 ence which has developed within the last ten years, and it is noth- 

 ing more or less than the elaboration of the ]\Iendelian law. 



So far as I know, there has been practically no a])plication of 

 genetics in the case of the honey bee, but the numerous instances 

 in the case of other animals and insects in which characters are 

 transmitted according to a definite mathematical plan, and the man- 

 ner in which mutations can be fixed and made permament charac- 

 ters leads me to believe that similar work can be done with the 

 honey bee. The honey bee, however, presents, perhaps, a more 

 complicated problem than any of those yet studied by the genetic 

 experts, owing to the fact that parthenogenesis is involved. 



There is a very interesting general write-up on the work in 

 genetics at the Bussey Institution in the July, 1911, Technical World 

 Magazine, page 513. I am sending you my copy of this magazine 

 under separate cover and would request that after reading the ar- 



