THE WORKER-BEE. 



77 



of fecundation (108). Yet the rudimental ovaries of some 

 of them contain a few undeveloped eggs (fig. 33) . 



176. Occasionally some of them are sufficiently developed 

 to be capable of laying eggs; but these eggs always produce 

 drones. Laying workers appear only when a colony has been 

 queenless for some time. Huber thought that fertile workers 

 were reared in the neighborhood of the young queens, and 

 that they received some of the peculiar food, or jelly on 

 which these queens are fed.* But it is more probable that 

 it is the increase of the milky food, given lavishly to the 

 larvcB in the first stage of their development, during a good 

 honey flow, which enlarged their ovaries (108), and that the 

 young bees, thus raised, having no more larvffi to nurse 

 when the hive has suddenly become queenless, feed each other 

 with their milky food, which excites their laying, as it does 

 for the queens (39). The number of drone-laying workers 

 is sometimes very large in a hopelessly queenless hive; we 

 have seen at least a dozen laying on the same comb. Mr. 

 Viallon, a noted bee-keeper of Louisiana, once had so many 

 in one queenless colony, that he was able to send several dozen 

 for dissection to bee-keepers in this country and Europe. 



lyy. Some persons may question the wisdom of Nature 

 in endowing the workers with the means of laying drone- 

 eggs, when there is no queen in the colony to be fecundated 

 by them. But Nature does nothing without purpose. The 

 main cause of the loss of the queen, when there is no brood 



* An extract from Huber's preface will be interesting in this con- 

 nection. After speaking of bis blindness, and praising the extraordinary 

 taste for Natural History, of bis assistant, Burnens, "wbo was born 

 with the talents of an observer," he says : "Every one of the facts I 

 now publish, we have seen, over and over again, during the period of 

 eight years, which we have employed in making our observations on 

 bees. It is impossible to form a just idea of the patience and skill 

 with which Burnens has carried out the experiments which I am about 

 to describe ; he has often watched some of the working-bees of our 

 hives, which we had reason to think fertile, for the space of twenty- 

 four hours, without distraction * * * ♦ and he counted fatigue 

 and pain as nothing, compared with the great desire he felt to know 

 the results." 



