118 THE bee-kbeper's guide ; 



common for her to attain the age of three years in the full 

 possession of her powers, while queens have been known to do 

 good work for five years. lyubbock has queen ants in his 

 nests that are fifteen or more years old, and still they are 

 vigorous layers. Queens, often at the expiration of one, two, 

 three or four years, depending on their vigor and excellence, 

 either cease to be fertile, or else become impotent to lay im- 

 pregnated eggs — the spermatheca having become emptied of 

 its sperm-cells. In such cases the workers usually supersede 

 the queen, that is, they rear a new queen before all the worker- 

 eggs are gone, and then destroy the old one. 



It sometimes happens, though rarely, that a fine looking 

 queen, with the full-formed ovaries and large spermatheca 

 well filled with male fluid, will deposit freely, but none of the 

 eggs will hatch. Readers of bee-papers know that I have 

 frequently received such for dissection. I received one Aug. 

 12, 1900, from Mr. E. R. Root. The first one I ever got was a 

 remarkably fine looking Italian, received from the late Dr. 

 Hamlin, of Tennessee. All such queens that I have examined 

 seem perfect, even though scrutinized with a high-power 

 objective. We can only say that the egg is at fault, as fre- 

 quently transpires with higher animals, even to the highest. 

 These females are barren ; through some fault with the 

 ovaries, the eggs grown therein are sterile. To detect just 

 what is the trouble with the egg is a very difficult problem, if 

 it is capable of solution at all. I have tried to determine the 

 ultimate cause, but without success. Cases have also been 

 observed where mated and impregnated queens fail to lay 

 impregnated eggs. Here the delicate organism of the sperma- 

 theca and its duct is at fault. Queens that have been chilled, 

 as shown by Siebold, Leuckart, and our own L,angstroth, are 

 often made drone-layers — that is, they lay only unimpregnated 

 eggs. I have also had one queen that produced many her- 

 maphroditic bees. These hermaphrodites are not really her- 

 maphrodites ; as, so far as I have examined, they have only 

 ovaries or testes, but externally they have drone-organs in 

 part, as, for instance, the appendages of the head and thorax ; 

 and worker-organs in part, as the abdomen, will be like that of 

 a drone. Indeed, I now have a very strange hermaphrodite, 



