DECISION OF BONNER. 117 



depends on the time of her impregnation ; for if that cir- 

 cumstance has been retarded for twenty or thirty days, then 

 the entire nature of the insect appears to be wholly reversed, 

 or, in other words, she appears to be so stultified, that she 

 lays her eggs in the wrong cells, the consequence of which 

 is, that drones come out of common cells, and common bees 

 come out of drone cells, and by way of a climax, queens 

 come forth from common eggs, if a due proportion of royal 

 jelly has been administered to them. 



Schirach and Huber are, however, decidedly opposed to 

 each other, in regard to the manner in which the queen is 

 generated by the common bee, and their respective systems, 

 as will be hereafter shown, are beset with every possible 

 doubt and objection. Bonner, who, although a most illiterate 

 man, was an excellent practical apiarian, was at the outset of 

 his career one of the staunchest advocates of the system 

 of Schirach ; but the result of his own experiments by 

 no means established the truth of it ; on the contrary, 

 the last time we visited the worthy enthusiast at Rosslyn 

 Castle, near Edinburgh, he candidly confessed, that although 

 he did actually succeed in one instance to obtain a queen, 

 yet he was ultimately obliged to enter his protest against it 

 as a general rule, and to deny that the common bees do 

 actually possess the power, per se, of generating a queen from 

 a plebeian egg. 



It is rather singular that not one of the advocates for the 

 alleged power of the common bee to generate a queen, will 

 ever take upon himself to affirm that it is a fixed and in- 

 variable property of the bee, but that it is solely contingent 

 upon a train of circumstances, which possibly may happen 

 in an isolated case, but on the certainty of which no reliance 

 whatever can be placed. It is also worthy of remark, that 

 not two of the advocates of that power are of one accord in 

 regard to the manner in which the metamorphosis of the 

 common egg into a royal one is accomplished ; in fact, the 



