INTERRELATIONS OF INSECTS 32/ 



to the brood and bees. The work of sealing with waxen caps 

 then goes forward rapidly, the covering being more or less 

 porous. Each kind of honey has its distinctive flavor and 

 aroma, derived, as already indicated, mainly from the particu- 

 lar blossoms by which it was secreted, but modified and soft- 

 ened by the manipulation given it in the hives. The last three 

 paragraphs are taken from Benton's useful manual. 



The phenomenon of " swarming " results from the tremen- 

 dous reproductive capacity of the queen, though it is immedi- 

 ately an instance of positive phototropism, as Kellogg has 

 shown. Accompanied by most of the workers, the old queen 

 abandons the hive to establish a new colony. The workers 

 that remain behind have provided against this contingency, 

 however, and the departed queen is soon, if not already, re- 

 placed by a new one. 



Determination of Caste. The difference between queen 

 and worker depends solely upon nutrition, both forms being 

 derived from precisely the same kind of egg. To produce a 

 queen, a large cell of special form is constructed, and its occu- 

 pant, instead of being weaned, is fed almost entirely upon the 

 highly nutritious secretion which worker grubs receive only at 

 first and in limited quantity. This nitrogenous food, the 

 product of cephalic glands, develops the reproductive system 

 in proportion to the amount received. Drone larvae get much 

 of it, though not so much as queens, while an occasional excess 

 of this " royal jelly " is believed to account for the abnormal 

 appearance of fertile workers. 



Parthenogenesis, or reproduction without fertilization, is 

 known to occur in the bee, as well as in various other insects. 

 The always unfertilized eggs of workers produce invariably 

 drones, as do also unfertilized eggs of the queen. Probably 

 the queen cannot control the sex of her eggs, as she has long 

 been supposed to do, for Dickel has recently found, among 

 other revolutionary facts, that all the eggs of the normal 

 mother bee are fertilized. 



