68 CONTRADICTIONS OF HUBER. 



Swammerdam proves, by repeated experiments, that it is 

 the young queen who departs with the swarm; and he 

 adduces one very cogent reason for it, which is, that at the 

 time when the swarm departs, the old queen is so burdened 

 with the weight of the eggs in her ovarium, that she cannot 

 fly, or at least not to that distance to which a swarm 

 sometimes extends its flight *. Huber, however, evidently 

 foresaw, that if he made the young queen the leader of the 

 swarm, it would go nearly to the breaking up of his system 

 altogether. He saw the difficulty in which he would be 

 involved, in regard to the impregnation of the young queen, 

 and therefore, rather than meet that difficulty, he had re- 

 course to the promulgation of the decided error, that it is 

 the old queen who leaves the hive with the swarm. 



Nevertheless, it is not long before he falls into his cus- 

 tomary contradictions, for, according to one statement, it is 

 the old queen who leads the swarm, and according to 

 another, it is the young queen ; but, then in the former 

 case, the old queen is already fructified, but in the latter, 

 it is the desire of the young queen to be fructified, which 

 urges her to leave the hive ; and on this occasion, she appears 

 to be in such a violent agitation, amounting to a kind of 

 delirium, that the sensation is, by some process, of the 

 nature of which Huber declares himself ignorant, commu- 

 nicated to the common bees, and it continues to increase, 

 until the queen pleases to betake herself off with the whole 

 troop of her agitated subjects : and this may be considered 

 as the programme of a swarm. 



The statement of Huber, that the queen does not begin to 



* Lombard says, " It is always the queen mother who departs with the first 

 swarm. To accomplish this, however, it is necessary thatshe ' should Delight ' 

 and arrived at the point of the suspension of the laying of her eggs during 

 the time that is required by the new swarm to construct their combs But if 

 a queen who is still laying her eggs, be made to enter by force an empty hive 

 she knows not where to deposit her eggs ; they foil from her against her will' 

 and are lost." 



