A PROBLEM OF HEREDITY 97 



One is that the drone has so affected the ovary of 

 the queen that some of her eggs are tainted with 

 his characteristics, even though they produce only 

 drones. Another suggestion is that the food 

 conveyed by the nurse bees to the young larva 

 makes a great deal of difference to its development, 

 and that larvae always partake to some extent of 

 the characters of the colony, even though it may 

 be headed by a new queen of an entirely different 

 race. In any case this could only apply to 

 a limited number, at least so far as the workers 

 of the original colony were concerned, as each 

 succeeding generation of nurse bees would have 

 less and less of the original colony's characteristics, 

 so that by introducing a pure mated queen of 

 a different race to the original colony, we 

 ultimately change the whole colony into a new 

 race — that of the new queen. 



But so far as the drones are concerned, you may 

 carry the investigation back as far as you like, back 

 through successive generations of queens, and still 

 you fail to reach a point when you can definitely 

 say the drone characteristics which unfertilised 

 eggs bear have been acquired. 



To put the case another way, the position 

 appears to be this. The female, or queen bee, 

 contains within her own person the means of 

 reproducing bees, but not bees which are in 

 any way like herself. Her unassisted pro- 

 geny is of a kind entirely different in its 



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