PHYSIOLOGY. 39 



their birth. To his amazement, these Queens whose im- 

 pregnation was thus unnaturally retarded, never laid any 

 eggs but such as produced drones 1 1 



He tried the experiment again and again, but always with 

 the same result. Some Bee-Keepers, long before his time, 

 had observed that all the brood in a hive were occasionally 

 drones, and of course, that such colonies rapidly went to 

 ruin. Before attempting any explanation of this astonishing 

 fact, I must call the attention of the reader, to another of 

 the mysteries of the Bee-Hive, 



Fertile Workers. ' 



It has already been remarked, that the workers are proved 

 by dissection to be females, all of which, under ordinary 

 circumstances, are barren. Occasionally, some of them 

 appear to be more fully developed than common, so as to be 

 capable of laying eggs : these eggs, like those of Queens 

 whose impregnation has been retarded, always produce 

 drones ! Sometimes, when a colony has lost its Queen, 

 these drone-laying workers are exalted to her place, and 

 treated with equal respect and affection, by the bees. Hu- 

 ber ascertained that these fertile workers were generally 

 reared in the neighborhood of the young Queens, and he 

 thought that they received some particles of the peculiar 

 food or jelly on which the Queens are reared. (See Eoyal 

 Jelly.) He did not pretend to account for the effect of 

 retarded impregnation ; and made no experiments to deter- 

 mine the facts, as to the fecundation of these fertile workers. 



Since the publication of Huber's work, nearly 50 years 

 ago, no light has been shed upon the mysteries of drone-lay- 

 ing Queens and workers, until quite recently. Dzierzon 

 appears to have been the first to ascertain the truth on this 

 subject ; and his discovery must certainly be ranked as un- 

 folding one of the most astonishing facts in all the range of 



