iv PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE 71 



J. J. Swammerdam, son of an apothecary at Amster- 

 dam, carried the investigation of the hive-bee much 

 further than any naturalist before him, though he did 

 not exhaust it. He proved definitely that the so-called 

 " king of the bees " was really a queen and the only 

 effective female in a hive. The chief part of his work 

 was done in 1673, when the dykes were cut to save 

 Amsterdam from the French invasion, so that the hives 

 in Holland were ruined, and scarcely any queens could 

 be procured. Swammerdam spent many months upon 

 the investigation of bees, and took scrupulous pains in 

 examining their structure and habits. Referring to his 

 Biblia Natura, in which the hive-bee is described, Prof. 

 Miall 



The life-history, the anatomy of the male, female and neuter 

 bees in every stage, and the whole economy of the hive, are 

 carefully described . . . The engraved figures would do 

 credit to the most skilful anatomists of any age. This, the first 

 extensive and truly scientific memoir on the hive and its inhabi- 

 tants, carries the exploration a long way at a single bound, and 

 biology can hardly produce a second example of a research 

 so comprehensive and disfigured by so few faults. 



Reaumur extended the knowledge of the honey- 

 bee still further by studies of the living insect in 

 observation hives ; Schirach, in 1771, proved that 

 worker-bees are imperfect females, and the history of 

 the wedding-night was first correctly described by 

 Huber in 1814. Finally, Dzierzon, in the middle of the 

 nineteenth century, showed that the eggs laid by 

 unwedded queens give birth to drones ; that the fertilisa- 

 tion of the queen takes place within a few days of her 

 quitting her cell, and lasts for life ; and that female 

 bees (queens and workers) proceed only from eggs 

 fertilised by drones. Queens and workers are respec- 

 tively produced from female bees by being fed on different 



