THE QUEEN. 57 



his report: "The ovaries wore filled with eggs, the poison- 

 sac full of fluid ; and the spermatheoa distended with a per- 

 fectly colorless, transparent, viscid liquid, witliout a trace of 

 spermutozoids." 



130. On oxamiuing this same colony a few days later, 

 we found satisfactory evidence that these drone-eggs were 

 laid by the queen which had been removed. No fresh eggs 

 had been deposited in the cells, and the bees on missing her 

 had begun to build royal cells, to rear, if possible, another 

 queen. Two of the royal cells were in a short time discon- 

 tinued ; wMle a third was sealed over in the usual way, to 

 undergo its changes to a perfect queen. As the bees had 

 only a drone-laying queen, whence came the female egg 

 from which thej- were rearing a queen ? 



At first we imagined that they might have stolen it from 

 another hive ; but on opening this cell it contained only a 

 dead drone! Huber had described a similar mistake made 

 by some of his bees. At the base of this cell was an unus- 

 ual quantity of the peculiar jelly fed to develop young 

 queens. One might almost imagine that the bees had dosed 

 the unfortunate drone to death ; as though they had hoped 

 by such hberal feeding to produce a change in his sexual 

 organization. 



137. In the Summer of 1854, we found another drone- 

 laying queen in our Apiary, with wings so shrivelled that 

 she could not fly. We gave her successively to several queen- 

 less colonies, in all of which she deposited only drone-eggs. 



138. In Italy there is a variety of the honey-bee differing 

 in size and color from the common kind. If a queen of this 

 variety is crossed with the common drones, her drone-prog- 

 eny will be Italian (351), and her worker-brood a cross 

 between the two ; thus showing that the kind of drones she 

 will produce has no dependence on the male by which she 

 is fecundated. 



