NATURAL HISTORY OF THE HONEY BEE. 39 



Effect of Retarded Impregnation on the Queen Bee. 



Huber, while experimenting to ascertain how the Queen 

 was fecundated, confined some of his young Queens to their 

 hives, by contracting the entrances, so that they were not 

 able to go in search of the drones, until three weeks after 

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

 pregnation was thus unnaturally retarded, never laid any 

 eggs but such as produced drones ! 



He tried this experiment repeatedly, but always with the 

 same resuli. 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 went rapidly 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, so as to be capable of 

 laying eggs : these eggs, like those of Queens whose im- 

 pregnation has been retarded, always produce drones! 

 Sometimes, when a colony has lost its Queen, and has 

 thoroughly despaired of obtaining another, these drone- 

 laying workers are exalted to her place, and treated with 

 equal respect and affection, by the bees. Huber 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. He did not pretend to 



