MASSACRE OF THE DRONES. 75 



we are not able to adduce a single instance in which a 

 queen bee was ever bred after the month of July, and 

 even that itself is a direct phenomenon ; Huber, however, 

 mentions an instance of a queen being born as late as the 

 fourth of October, a circumstance unknown in the whole 

 history of the bee, and the following experiment may be 

 designated as one of the wildest of Huber's fictions. He 

 says, — this queen was put into a leaf hive, in which a 

 considerable number of males were still existing. By males 

 we must suppose that he means drones, and when was a 

 drone ever known to exist in a hive in the month of 

 October ? The massacre of the drones always commences 

 in the months of July and August, and frequently much 

 earlier, the breeding season being then over, and the labours 

 of the hive drawing to a close. In the year 1836 we had 

 four hives, the drones of which were massacred in the 

 month of June, but it must be observed that we had pre- 

 vented the swarming of those hives. The queens, however, 

 still continued to lay drone eggs as late as the beginning 

 of August, but they were punctually murdered as soon 

 as they made their appearance. No one but Huber, who 

 in all his reports seems to set all truth at defiance, would 

 have ventured to speak of the queen laying eggs, and of the 

 existence of drones in the month of October, much less 

 to make it the foundation of an experiment, the tendency 

 of which is, to support his fallacious theory of a retarded 

 impregnation. 



Huber, however, proceeds to state that the queen, from 

 the fourth of October to the thirty-first, made four-and- 

 twenty fruitless attempts before she could obtain the fe- 

 cundation of the drone, and being then twenty-seven days 

 old, her fecundation had been retarded. Thus we have 

 an instance recorded on the authority of "the prince of 

 apiarians *," of a queen bee breeding in the beginning of 



« So styled by a Mr. Watts, a writer in the Mechanics' Magazine, whom 

 we challenged to produce a queen from a common egg, but he failed in 



