126 Miscellaneous. 
according to the expression customary in apiculture, her nuptial 
flight, which, however, was rendered useless by the absence of males. 
She did not return. Nothing more took place during the year: 
not a single other female nor any male emerged. 
In 1894 a female cell was constructed on June 15, and several 
others were built in the course of July ; but none came to any good. 
A parasitic disease seemed to have attacked the colony ; many larve 
died in their cells, and they soon perished in numbers every day ; 
the queen herself was attacked, and succumbed at the commence- 
ment of October, while the last workers died a few days later. No 
male had yet appeared. 
It was important to see whether the workers, which were still 
fairly numerous when the queen died, would not set to work to 
make a new one for themselves, as normally happens in the case 
of our hive-bees when accidentally bereft of their egg-producer. 
Nothing of the kind took place, and this was, @ prior?, to be foreseen, 
In the case of the hive-bee the larve are fed according to their daily 
wants, so that, when the queen happens to disappear, the workers 
have only to supply some larva with the royal jelly, instead of the 
paste that produces the workers, and the selected larva, which would 
have become a worker, will develop into a queen. In the case of 
Melipona the cell when constructed is immediately provisioned, and 
receives the whole of the food necessary for the development of the 
larva; the queen deposits an egg in it, and the cell is at once sealed 
up. The larva that will be hatched in the cell will therefore develop 
entirely removed from any intervention on the part of the workers, 
and the destiny of the future bee is consequently irrevocably fixed 
from the very beginning. Asa matter of fact, no change was made 
in the cells already constructed. T'rigona is incapable of replacing, 
as the hive-bee does, the vanished mother of the nest. 
An interesting point still to be determined was whether, as 
appears to be the case in certain instances, but not always, in our 
common bees when they have lost their queen, the faculty of ovi- 
position would be manifested by some of the workers. Building 
operations were continued for several days longer; a few large 
queen cells were constructed at the edge of the last comb and 
received their store of paste. In this task the workers displayed 
very great activity, and often waited several hours while the queen 
visited the cells to perform her function. Eventually they became 
tired ; the paste was soon delivered up to pillage, and consumed in 
afew moments. More than once the cells were sealed up, and it 
was possible to believe that an egg had been deposited in them by a 
worker which I had not succeeded in detecting in the act. Before 
long, however, the cells were reopened and the contents devoured. 
After being provisioned and sealed up afresh, they again underwent 
the same fate. Then all operations ceased, and the workers suc- 
cumbed one after the other. 
To recapitulate: in the space of three years a colony of Z'ri rigona 
produced a queen in the second, and virtually several queens in the 
third year, but never a single male. Since observations were 
arrested by the premature death of the queen, we are left in doubt 
