1905 



GLEAMNGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



467 



in the oviducts of the hen or in the sperma- 

 theca of the queen-bee has the effect of chang- 

 ing their blood. If as Burbank, the great 

 plant- breeder of California, claims, the scion 

 modifies the stock into which it is grafted, 

 then we should hesitate to affirm that teleg- 

 ony might not be true in case there is ex- 

 perimental proof of the fact. I must say 

 that I was skeptical, not only as to its 

 truth among birds and bees, but, also, with 

 mammals. I wondered if somebody had not 

 blundered. 



EXPERIMENTS WITH FOWLS. 



I secured two breeds of fowls— Light Brah- 

 mas and Brown Leghorns. These are very 

 different. The one lays brown eggs ; the 

 other, white ones; the first are white with 

 feathered legs, which last feature holds 

 with great dilution of blood. The others 

 are brown, with clean legs, and very differ- 

 ent from the quiet tractable Brahmas in 

 their nervous irritability. I kept all to- 

 gether over winter, and saw them mate 

 each with the other, repeatedly. In the 

 spring I put Brahmas in one breeding-yard 

 and Leghorns in another; and after three 

 weeks of separation not a chicken from the 

 eggs in either lot showed any signs of taint 

 at all. No Leghorn had a sign of a feather 

 striping her legs. This, though I hatched 

 over 2o0 chickens. Do our readers wonder 

 that my doubts of the truth of telegony 

 with birds was greatly increased? 



TELEGONY WITH BEES. 



With the queen-bee the sperm is always 

 in the spermatheca during her entire life; 

 and if there is a subtile way for influence to 

 escape and impress, here would seem to be 

 an opportunity. With bees, too, because of 

 the law of parthenogenesis, it is easy to ex- 

 periment on a large scale if we can only be 

 sure that our queens are purely mated. To 

 be sure of this last, I secured a Syrian 

 oueen, one of the first imported by Mr. 

 Jones. Of course, she was certainly of un- 

 mixed blood, and she was as surely mated 

 to a Syrian drone. I bred numerous queens 

 from her, but was careful that no drones 

 were produced. These young queens were 

 all mated to Italian drones. From these 

 queens I raised hundreds of drones. As the 

 drones are agamic, or the result of parthen- 

 ogenetic reproduction, they were pure Syri- 

 ans; and if there was any show of Italian 

 blood it must le because of telegony. The 

 Syrian drones are very different from Ital- 

 ians in markings. I examined most careful- 

 ly hundreds— yes, thousands— of these drones, 

 and in not a single case did I note any mark 

 or sign of Italian taint. All these drones 

 from the cross-mated Syrian queens were 

 apparently absolutely pure. Do any of our 

 readers wonder that I was stronger than 

 ever in my belief that telegony did not pre- 

 vail with bees? I fully beUeve that, if the 

 queen shows taint in her drone progeny, she 

 was already tainted, and it is not because 

 she is mated with an impure drone that her 

 blood is untrue. 



WITH MAMMALS. 



I took pains to visit the great exposition' 

 at Chicago while the mules were being ex- 

 hibited. I took occasion to inquire of the 

 extensive breeders. Those who are breed- 

 ing mules have a fine opportunity to note 

 the presence or probability of the truth of 

 telegony. They breed mules, and often, 

 afterward, colts from the same mares. 

 Here the tendency to long ears would be- 

 quick indication of the truth of telegony; 

 yet every one with whom I conversed said 

 he had no faith whatever in the theory of 

 telegony. 



Quite recently Prof. Ewart, of Edinburg, 

 Scotland, has repeated the experiments of 

 Lord Morton. He used a quagga— a kind of 

 zebra— and mares. He says that his re- 

 searches give no sure proof of the truth of 

 telegony. Moreover, he says, granting the 

 facts as stated by Lord Morton, "And yet 

 we can not affirm that telegony is proved. ' ' 

 He says that colts from mares that have 

 never been bred to zebra or quagga show 

 often as obvious stripes as those shown by 

 the colts bred by Lord Morton. We see, 

 then, that telegony fails all along the line. 

 The strong probability then is, that, in all 

 cases where telegony has seemed to be 

 proved, the facts could be explained either 

 by taint in the blood of the female or else 

 by the principle of atavism. This last is 

 the explanation offered by Prof. Ewart, of 

 the stripes which showed in the colts bred 

 by Lord Morton. 



The practical importance of this refuta- 

 tion is apparent. We suffer the misfortune, 

 through an accident, of having a valuable 

 short-horn or other animal mate with a sire 

 of another breed. If telegony is true she is 

 greatly injured, and can never again be re- 

 garded as a pure short-horn. We now know 

 that she is all right, and that we lose only 

 in the one offspring. In case of our fowls, 

 if telegony is true any case of impure mat- 

 ing taints the hens, and they are for ever 

 after of impure blood. We now would re- 

 gard them just as good and just as pure, 

 even though they had mated in the past 

 with cocks of other breeds, and know that 

 eggs laid after three weeks separation from 

 any but cocks of the same blood will surely 

 give offspring that is as pure as the hen that 

 lays the eggs. 



ORANGE HONEY. 



Yes, we have it. It is very white, and of 

 exquisite flavor. We should expect from 

 the wonderfully delicious scent that now fills 

 the air in all our citrus regions that this 

 would be true; yet orange honey will never 

 have any commercial importance any more 

 than will that from fruit in the East. It is 

 not that the nectar is not abundant. It is 

 often very plenteous; but the bees at this 

 early season are few in numbers, and so 

 they gather but little, and that goes mostly 

 for the daily needs. I wish, however, that all 

 our friends could now ride with me through 

 the valleys of our beautiful Southland. Yes- 



