IN THE HONEY-BEE. 61 



in the queen-bee, as in its perfectly developed state it is visible 

 even to the naked eye, of the size of a pin's head, and conse- 

 quently could not have escaped the notice of those two observers. 

 Another cause of drone-productiveness in a bee-hive may 

 also be explained consistently by Dzierzon's theory. Thus 

 in certain, but undoubtedly very rare cases, it happens that 

 fertilized queens in advanced age towards the end of their 

 vital activity become drone-bearing, after showing themselves 

 to be normal up to that period as regards the production of 

 drones, females, and workers ; normal fertilized queens, there- 

 fore, in course of time lose the faculty of producing workers and 

 females ; the brood deposited by such old queens can only be 

 reared to male bees, certainly, according to Dzierzon's theory, 

 for the self-evident reason, that the store of semen in the seminal 

 receptacle of a fertilized queen is gradually exhausted. As a 

 queen only undertakes the wedding-flight once in her life, and 

 fertilizes many thousands of eggs destined for the worker-cells 

 for several consecutive years, with semen received by a single 

 act of copulation*, although only one or two spermatozoids of 

 the male semen are employed in the fecundation of one egg, yet 

 the seminal mass will at last be used up, and at the same time 

 the old queen will lose the faculty of laying the required number 

 of fertilized eggsf. 



* According to a statement made to me by Dzierzon, a queen may acquire 

 the power of laying fertilized eggs for five years, by a single normally executed 

 copulation. 



f Upon this subject I may allow the experienced Apiarian Von Berlepsch 

 to speak, as he has done in the Eienenzeitung (1855, p. 78) in the following 

 words : " It is a fact, that queens, when their fertility is on the decline, lay 

 a greater or less number of drone-eggs in worker-cells amongst female eggs ; 

 nay, even with extremely fruitful queens, it by no means rarely happens, 

 that individual drones escape from worker-cells in the midst of workers. 

 How is this explicable except by Dzierzon's hypothesis, as even in this 

 case the queens evidently wish to lay, not male, but female eggs? Lean- 

 ing upon Dzierzon's hypothesis, I conjecture that in queens whose fertility is 

 already on the wane, every egg can no longer be fertilized, because the recep- 

 tacle is no longer sufficiently filled with semen, but that in queens which are 

 still in the full power of their fertility, an egg which ought to be fertilized may 

 now and then glide past without fecundation ; a spermatozoon may not ad- 

 here, or may be lost again before it can penetrate through the micropyle into 

 the yelk." 



