io6 



THE BEE-KEEPERS' REVIEW. 



worker. Mr. Greiner has, evidently, ac- 

 cepted these ideas from German bee-liter- 

 ature, but thereby he has made some 

 mistakes; and, as lam a follower and de- 

 fender of this so-called organic concep- 

 tion, I will try to give a proper explana- 

 tion. 



The mistakes of Mr. Greiner are these: 

 If the food in question is chyle, and 

 identical with the blood, it can't be the 

 product of glands; and if it is the product 

 of glands it is not identical with the 

 blood. Further, bees have no veins, and 

 the blood of the bee does not circulate in 

 veins. (See any good text-book). 



Prof. Leuckard and others were of the 

 opinion that the food called royal jelly is 

 the product of the glands, which are in 

 the head of the bee. This opinion was 

 generally accepted till Schoenfeld pub- 

 lished, in 1882, his experiments, discov- 

 eries and observations about the nourish- 

 ment of bees. At present we know that 

 this food is fully digested pollen, and is 

 prepared in the true stomach, where all 

 the undigestible parts are separated, and 

 then the product is called chyle. But 

 this chyle is more than siiiiply a digested 

 food, as it contains a large number of 

 cells which originate from the intima of 

 the true stomach and reptesent the blood- 

 globules of higher animals, and which 

 cause the white, milky appearance of the 

 chyle or royal jelly. This chyle passes 

 through the wall of the true stomach, 

 by diffusion, into the body of the bee, 

 where the blood in circulating, and as it 

 undergoes no change at all, thereby is, 

 in fact,y«//>' idenlical uiith the blood of 

 the bee. This chyle is generally prepared 

 by the young nurse-bees only, and they 

 have the ability to regurgitate the same 

 by the wonderful organ called the stom- 

 ach mouth. P'urther, we know that this 

 chyle is fed to young larvae the first 

 three days. Worker and drone-larvie 

 never get any other food during their 

 larval state. The queen, too, is entirely- 

 dependent on this food from the worker 

 bees, and receives no other nitrogenous 

 food; so we can truly say the blood of the 



worker bees is circulating in the body of 

 the queen. This explains how it is pos- 

 sible that a queen may daily lay eggs to 

 an amount that doubles the weight of 

 her own body. Further, the drones 

 can't eat pollen, and chyle is fed to them 

 by the worker bees. This is of so much 

 importance to them, that if the young 

 bees cease to feed them, they will starve 

 to death inside of three days, even on 

 honey-combs. The same food is some- 

 times given to the older field-bees. All 

 these are proven facts, and every bee- 

 keeper should know them, but they are 

 generally ignored. We see that the in- 

 fluence of the worker-bees on the queen 

 and the drones, and on the sperm and 

 queen-cells, must be considerable, as the 

 blood which circulates in their bodies is 

 prepared in the body of worker bees. 

 If anything is astonishing, it is that the 

 worker bees have no more influence on 

 the color of the coming generation. 



This explains fully, what Doolittle says 

 in Scientific Oueen-Rearing, to have ob- 

 served about drones, and what he thinks 

 to be contradictory to parthenogenesis; 

 and it is not necessary to theorize in the 

 way Mr. Griener does on page 74. Par- 

 thenogenesis is not so very seldom as he 

 thinks, and with bees is now fully proven 

 by Wiesmaun. 



WHY A COI^ONY SHOUI,D BE REGARDED 

 AS .\ SINGLE ORGANISM. 



In consideration of this close connec- 

 tion of the different partsof a colony, and 

 in consideration of the fact that no sin- 

 gle bee can preserve her existence except 

 as a member of a colony, Gerstung says 

 we are fully justified in calling the colo- 

 ny of bees an organism ^ as we thereby 

 will gain a better understanding of the 

 reciprocal dependence of the different 

 parts of the colony. 



A DEFENSE OF INIiREF^DING. 



F. B. Simpson says that freak, best 

 queens should not be selected to breed 

 from (page, 265) as they show the least 

 uniformity. If I had a colony of bees 

 which gave me double the amount of 



