68 QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND. 



the drone is produced parthenogenetically, i.e., witiiout 

 sexual union. The production of a male by parthenogenesis 

 is rather unusual in nature. More often, as in Aphids, it is 

 the female that is produced parthenogenetically, and then 

 the species can reproduce itself through several successive 

 generations without fertilisation, and while this kind of re- 

 production is going on the male disappears completely. But 

 with the bee this is not so. Fertilisation by the drone is 

 needed for each fresh generation of workers and queens. 

 Most of us have proved to our own satisfaction that the 

 drone can be produced parthenogenetically. A colony loses 

 its queen in winter, and a new queen is reared, which fails 

 to get fertilised, with the result that she produces drones 

 only. But are all the drones produced by a fertilised queen 

 the result of parthenogenesis? Perez, in 1878, thought not, 

 for on examining 300 drones produced by an Italian queen, 

 fertilised by a French black drone, he found 149 which he 

 thought indicated hybridism. It is clear that if it is true 

 that the drone is always produced parthenogenetically, the 

 queen, provided her gametes are pure, must produce pure 

 drones, no matter what kind of a drone has fertilised her. 

 I have bred drones from about half a dozen of my golden 

 queens e\ery season for some years. Some of these golden 

 queens were producing all golden workers, others certain 

 proportions of intermediates, others all intermediates. Now 

 the drones from the queens producing all golden workers 

 were all golden, as shown in Fig. 6, though they varied a 

 little, as Avere also the drones from most of the queens 

 producing some or all intermediate workers, but two of these 

 queens produced certain proportions of darker drones. One 

 of these was a queen raised in 191 1. The workers she 

 produced were all intermediates. On May 29th, 1912, I 

 examined seventy-seven of her drones ; twenty-six had the 

 first four segments largely yellow, ten the fourth segment 

 smudged with black, twenty-seven had only three segments 

 yellow, the fourth segment being black, twelve had only 

 two segments yellow, and two had the abdomen entirely 

 black, with only the edges of the first and second segments 

 yellow. One's first thought in trying to explain this remark- 

 able result is to suspect that the queen was not producing 

 pure golden gametes, but the facts that the queen had the 



