W AMERICAN 



* ^r * • 



ApfcULTURIST. 



A. Jotarnal Devoted to Practical Beekeeping. 



VOL. X. 



OCTOBER, 1892. 



No. 10. 



ARTIFICIAL FERTILIZATION. 



In a well written article on "The Com- 

 ing Bee" in the September number of 

 the Apiculturist, Mr. J. Edward Giles, 

 when treating of artificial fertilization, 

 gives, provided it be practicable, the 

 preference to the mode to which I 

 called attention in the August number 

 of your monthly. By the way, we all 

 know that a queen which lays worker- 

 eggs sometimes changes into a drone- 

 egg-layer. Is not the cause — or one 

 of tlie causes — of this defect that she 

 was imperfectly fecundated? Well, by 

 the method I mentioned a most thorough 

 fecundation could be effected and the 

 number of those drone-egg-layers very 

 probably be reduced to a minimum. 



In case this method should turn out 

 to be impracticable, Mr Giles would 

 take refuge to a way similar to the one 

 described by Mr. Langstroth, who took 

 a piece of drone comb, in which eggs 

 had just been deposited, and touched 

 some of them with a fine brush dipped 

 in the diluted semen of drones. Mr. 

 Langstroth failed in his experiment be- 

 cause — well, both he and Mr. G'les sur- 

 mise that the eggs should not have 

 been in drone cells. This may have 

 been thus, but would not undiluted 

 semen have been better, perhaps ? Or, 

 if diluted semen is good enough, was 

 not the dilution a faulty one? Such ex- 

 periments are quite intricate things and 

 the least deviation from the right road 

 leads to failure. 



Mr. Giles, in order to get drone eggs 

 laid in worker cells proposes to use ''the 



eggs of a laying worker, or, better prob- 

 ably, of an unfertilized queen." This 

 advice, no doubt, is pretty ingenious 

 and yet I have some objections against 

 it. Drones hatched from eggs laid by 

 worker bees are smaller than those from 

 a queen, and even if they should be capa- 

 ble of fertilizing queens, are held in quite 

 low esteem. Well, if these drones are 

 of no account, the eggs from which they 

 came could not have been worth much 

 either, and, therefore, I should entirely 

 discard such eggs as regards artificial 

 fertilization. But, must I ask, are the 

 eggs of an unfertilized queen much bet- 

 ter? I am, of course, well aware that 

 some authorities "believe" that drones 

 raised from them (I don't mean the 

 authorities, I mean the unfertilized 

 queens !) when fine and large are just 

 as good as any drones, but others "dis- 

 believe," and I cannot help thinking 

 that the latter are right. A fecundated 

 queen is "the" queen, she has under- 

 gone quite an important change and 

 what eggs s/ie lays are in accordance 

 with nature's best way, while an unferti- 

 lized queen in spite of her laying eggs is, 

 to some extent, a sort of undeveloped 

 and imperfect being. Therefore I should 

 not put much confidence in her eggs 

 and rather use those from a good work- 

 er-egg laying queen. All right, I hear 

 somebody say, but how to bring this 

 about? How? I answer. Did not. M. 

 G. Doolittle teach us some time ago 

 how larvffi can be taken from their cells, 

 and how they are to be transferred 

 into other cells ; and have not hundreds 

 (149) 



