166 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE 



Mar. 15 



General Correspondence 



THE ANATOMY OF THE HONEY-BEE, 



Many of the Accepted Facts Shown to be Fallacies. 



BY R. E. SNODGBASS. 



Whafs the use of knowing so much, xvhen so much 

 vouknow ain't so?— JosH Billings. 



For more than three centuries the honey- 

 bee has been the innocent victim of the 

 grossest kind of anatomical misrepresenta- 

 tion. No other insect has suffered so at the 

 hands of unskilled dissectors, no other has 

 been so maligned by unscrupulous artists. 

 After looking over the great mass of publish- 

 ed accounts and drawings purported by their 

 authors or copiers to illustrate the structure 

 of the honey-bee, and after comparing these 

 with the actual parts of the bee itself, the 

 writer here takes the occasion of assuring 

 the bee-keeping public or any suspecting 

 entomologist that the bee is not nearly so 

 bad as it has been painted. The detailed 

 results of this investigation have been 

 published as a bulletin from the office of 

 apiculture, of the Bureau of Entomology, of 

 the United States Department of Agricul- 

 ture (Technical Series No. 18) . While full 

 credit must be given to those authors of con- 

 scientious work who have described and fig- 

 ured what they saw, even though they did 

 not see rightly, we can not condone the 

 practice common among many writers on 

 bees of making full descriptions, and espe- 

 cially complete pictures of things they saw 

 only in part. While, perhaps, few writers 

 have actually put into words descriptions 

 of organs and structures they had not seen, 

 few, on the other hand, have hesitated at 

 publishing pictures of things they never 

 saw clearly, or at filling in elaborate details 

 from their imaginations. This attitude is 

 hard to explain; for why is it not just as rep- 

 rehensible to publish a drawing that de- 

 picts for facts things that were never seen 

 as it is to describe for truth what one never 

 saw? 



When Swammerdam wrote about bees, 

 away back in the seventeenth century, and 

 drew pictures of their anatomy, he probably 

 did the best he knew how to do or could do 

 in his time and circumstances. But we can 

 not see any excuse for some of the gross in- 

 accuracies made by writers during the last 

 fifty years, some of whose productions are 

 so far from the truth that a mere mistake of 

 observation could never account for them. 

 For example, Samuelson and Hicks (The 

 Honey-bee, 1860) represent the mandible of 

 the worker as having a row of seven teeth 

 on its cutting edge! Girdwoyn (Anatomic 

 et physiologic de I'abeille, 1876) and Girard 

 (Les abeilles, 1878) are responsible for some 

 of the worst, and, at the same time, some of 

 the most widely spread examples of ana- 



tomical absurdities in pictures. The former 

 wrote a pretentious memoir on the anatomy 

 and physiology of the bee, accompanied by 

 twelve large plates which received two med- J 

 als at the time in Austria. This is the source I 

 of the much copied illustration of the res- 

 piratory system (see The Honey-bee, 1904, 

 Fig. 27). Some of Girard 's drawings are « 

 probably the crudest ever published in in- 

 sect anatomy. In his book we find the orig- 

 inal of that common picture of the bee's 

 heart, which represents the latter as p pale 

 band extending through the middle of a 

 black field supposed to have the outlines of 

 a bee's body (see The Honey-bee, Fig. 28) . 

 This is too ridiculous to deserve comment. 

 It is safe to assume that the artist never saw 

 the dorsal vessel of a bee. Girard's illustra- 

 tion of the sting is a design with absolutely 

 no anatomical meaning, and is physiologi- 

 cally impossible. His pictures of the male 

 and female reproductive organs, while crude, 

 are better than some of the others, and are 

 evidently taken from Clerici (L'Ape sua 

 anatomia — suoi nemici, 1875) . 



To Leuckart we are indebted for several 

 very instructive pictures of the interior of 

 the bee. His combination drawing of the 

 alimentary canal, the respiratory system, 

 and the nervous system has been very wide- 

 ly copied. (See Lang's Text-book of Com- 

 parative Anatomy, Fig. 320; Packard's Text- 

 book of Entomology, Fig. 426; Root's A B 

 C and X Y Z of Bee Culture, page 11; Cow- 

 an, The Honey-bee, frontispiece; Cook, Bees 

 and Bee-keeping, Fig. 27. Cowan copies a 

 modification of the drawings from Witzgall, 

 while Cook makes a modification from 

 Cowan.) The picture, as just stated, is in- 

 structive in a general way; but the shape of 

 the air-sacs and the disposition of the tra- 

 cheal tubes are nothing like these organs in 

 the bee itself. 



The popularizing of any subject in science 

 has always been a difficult task because the 

 public wants something interesting to read, 

 and the bare facts in most cases can not be 

 made into entertaining literature; while, on 

 the other hand, an embellishment of these 

 facts by additions from the writer's fancy is 

 not science. Of all the books written on the 

 bee, there is no doubt that the first volume 

 of Cheshire's Bees and Bee-keeping (1886) 

 has done more than any other to popularize 

 the subject of bee anatomy. But there is 

 also no doubt that Cheshire was careless in 

 his observation of details, and that he did 

 not appreciate the true value of evidence. 

 Therefore he was prone to build up theories 

 on altogether too small a basis of fact. His 

 work, however, is probably the most readable 

 and the most read of all descriptions of in- 

 sect anatomy. His pictures are good from 

 an artistic standpoint, are intelligible, and 

 have been widely copied even into purely 

 scientific texts. Yet it will be evident to 

 any one who carefully examines the internal 

 organs of the bee in nature that Cheshire 

 made little effort to reproduce faithfully the 

 exact shapes of the organs and their parts. 

 A scientific picture depends for effect upon 



