22 THE PRINCIPLES OF BEE BREEDING. 
hybrid queen of the second or third generation should be found to 
produce drones which could not be distinguished from Italians. 
Impatiently did I await the return of spring. The drones finally 
made their appearance and diverged likewise in two directions ; 
one portion could not be distinguished from Italian drones, while 
another portion resembled the Egyptian drones in size, but having 
black bodies with grayish pubescence. I then raised young 
queens from an Egyptian hybrid queen of the second degree of 
degeneration, and arranged to have them fertilized by drones de- 
rived from the same mother, but bearing Italian markings. The 
workers produced by these queens resembled the Italians, while 
the drones diverged in the two directions adverted to. I now pro- 
ceeded to breed in-and-in from the hybrids thus obtained, and in 
the third and fourth generations all the drones bore the Italian 
markings. It might here be objected that on ataval principles, 
these hybrids must revert to their distinct parental or primal races, 
as is the case with hybrids of the black bee and the Italians. But 
I have now before me black Egyptian hybrids of the nineteenth 
generation, and these still retain their characteristic markings 
unchanged alike in queens, and drones, and workers, though rather 
intensified in degree and permanence. Firmly established, there- 
fore, do I regard this fact — From a cross of the black bee with the 
Egyptian, a hybrid is produced which no man can distinguish from 
the Italian bee. 
Now what do these observations teach? For brevity’s. sake I 
will express the question thus :— Did Divine Omnipotence, when 
placing the animal creation upon the earth, provide in each case 
only one primitive pair? Or did He create each race at once in 
larger groups? And if the latter, were all the animals of the 
same class perfectly alike as regards size and color? Or did God 
create directly the different races of the honey bee? When we 
reflect that no mortal eye witnessed the grand act of creation, and 
further consider that no reply can be deduced from any known laws 
of nature, they may be regarded as highly presumptuous. But 
the arrogance apparently involved in them vanishes at once, when 
I state that I have not deduced the reply from my own mental cog- 
itations, but from facts with which I became acquainted when 
crossing the common black bee with the Egyptian. My observa- 
tions constrained me to accept two primitive races for the honey 
e. A portion of each of these races certainly existed since the 
