310 



THE AMERICAN NATURALIST [Vol. XLIII 



In a word the final proof of qualitative identity of phenomena 

 must always in last analysis be qualitative in its nature : quanti- 

 tative evidence in such cases can at best have but an inferential 

 confirmatory bearing on the qualitative point at issue. 9 



Raymond Pearl. 



EXPERIMENTAL ZOOLOGY 

 Are the Drone Eggs of the Honey-Bee Fertilized? Cuenot 1 has 

 put to the test once more Dzierzon's famous theory in regard to 

 the nature of the drones of the hive bee. Dzierzon. as is well 

 known, furnished strong evidence in favor of the view that the 

 egg that produces a drone is not fertilized. An obvious test of 

 this view is found in crossing a virgin queen of one race by a 

 male of another race. All of her worker offspring should be 

 hybrids but her drone offspring should be purely maternal in 

 character. It is said that the failure of one such experiment 

 to give the expected results caused Dzerzon to abandon tempo- 

 rarily his theory. Other workers too have from time to time 

 found that the drones in such cases sometimes show hybrid 

 characters and this argument has been repeatedly urged against 

 Dzierzon's theory despite the large amount of evidence of a 

 different kind to the contrary. 



Cuenot crossed a virgin female of the black or Italian bee of 

 pure race with a " yellow bee " also of pure race. All the workers 

 produced showed the yellow bands of the yellow parent; some 

 300 drones were black like the mother, two only showed a large 

 yellow band at the top of the abdomen (recalling the more 

 numerous yellow bands of the yellow bee), and about a dozen 

 other males also showed some yellow bands on the abdomen. 

 " Do those yellow bands indicate hybridization? " Such bands 

 were never found in the males of neighboring hives. The ex- 

 periment is inconclusive, Cuenot says, but it shows the necessity 

 of examining not only the purity of the pure races but also the 

 extent of their variation. The possibility that these few hybrid 

 males may have arisen from eggs laid by the hybrid workers is 

 not considered by Cuenot but until this possibility is also ex- 

 cluded the results can not be maintained to show the hybrid 

 nature of the drones except in the latter sense. If the males 



p. 304, supra. S g P g g 



1 Cuenot, L. Comp. Bend. Soc. Biol, LXVT, 1909. 



