58 PARTHENOGENESIS 



ready laid in these former worker-cells, or which were found by 

 them already excluded in such cells, with the ordinary worker- 

 food, but furnish them with royal-food, as indeed all the eggs 

 deposited by a fertilized queen in worker-cells are of one kind, 

 namely female. But in order that the female sexual organs of 

 such a larva may acquire their development, the larva must 

 receive royal-food ; if, on the contrary, the female sexual organs 

 are to remain undeveloped for the advantage of the organs of 

 the worker-bee, destined for work, this object is attained by the 

 administration of worker-food. I leave it undecided in what 

 the distinction between the worker- and royal-food consists ; 

 for the Apiarians have hitherto been at variance, as to whether 

 the larvae of workers and queens received the same food, but the 

 latter in greater quantity, or whether the queen's food differed 

 from that of the workers not only in its quantity, but also in its 

 quality. From Leuckart's recent investigations*, however, it 

 appears that there really is a qualitative difference between 

 the two kinds of food. The larvae destined to become workers 

 only receive the paste prepared by the workers in their digestive 

 organs during the first days of their life, whilst in the latter days 

 of their larval existence they are fed with pollen and honey; the 

 queen-larvae, on the contrary, are supplied with the above paste 

 during their whole larval existence. Leuckartf found the first 

 traces of the internal genital organs in the female larvae of six 

 days old ; it is exactly at this time that the change of food takes 

 place in the worker-larvae, which up to this period are nourished 

 just like the queen-larvae with the same paste. In this way we 

 get an explanation of the circumstance which has been observed 

 by most experienced Apiarians, that a female larva does not re- 

 quire the usage of a queen from its earliest period in order to 

 become perfectly sexual, but that worker-larvae, even several 

 (six or seven) days old, may also be reared to queens, when 

 their narrow cells are subsequently enlarged, and they are abun- 

 dantly supplied with royal-paste, instead of with workers'-bread 

 (pollen and honey). 



If then it is certain that a worker-bee or a queen may be 

 reared indifferently from every larva of a worker-cell derived 



* See his Secbacher Studien in the Bienenzeitung , 1855, p. 209. 

 t See Leuckart, loc. cit. supra, p. 210. 



