BOTANICAL SOCIETY OF CANADA. 
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the aclacliment of the ovum, and to insert this piece of wax in the other cell. Still, 
all was of no avail ; the ova were invariably expelled. 
Being now baffled in all my attempts with the ova, I next tried the worms or 
larvas. I carefully interchanged them when very young — putting the drone into 
the cradle of the neuter, and the neuter into the cradle of the drone. But the bee 
at once discovered the changelings and expelled them. Very numerous trials were 
made to obviate accidental causes. The question now arose — Do these experi- 
ments conclusively prove that the ova are originally different, and is this the true 
cause of the expulsion ? There was still a crucial experiment by which it might be 
determined whether the expulsion was due to the essential difference in the ova 
and larvae. The experiment was simply to interchange neuter and drone eggs, not 
with one another, but among themselves — that is, to remove the ova in small cells 
to other small cells, and to treat the ova of drones in the same way. On trying 
this experiment, I found that the same result followed: that the removed ova were 
always expelled. This proved decisively that the ejection of the ova was simply 
on the ground of the removal, and that the experiment told neither for nor against 
the theory of the identity of the ova. This left the question entirely open, and I 
was obliged to resort to some other means. The next experiment was to remove 
the queen from the hive, and also all the neuter brood, leaving only drone brood. 
The object of this experiment was to ascertain whether a queen could be developed 
from the larva of a drone — that is, whether a perfect female could be developed 
from a larva, which, by ordinary treatment, would certainly become a male. The 
bees were forced either to make no attempt to replace the queen or to 
develope one from the larva of a drone. To my great satisfaction, I found that the 
usual plan was adopted for replacing the queen. The cell was elongated and iso- 
lated from the other cells. It was in due time closed, and the hatching went on 
as usual. Unfortunately, however, the cell was broken by the incautious opening 
of the window of the hive, and the hatching was suspended. The chrysalis was 
not sufficiently matured to determine the sex. The experiment was again repeated, 
and the construction of queen's cells for drone brood was proceeded with, but I 
have not yet succeeded in obtaining a perfect queen. The cause of failure seemed 
to be the want of hatching power. In such experiments, the loss of the hive is 
usually involved, and there is an unwillingness to sacrifice a valuable hive. But 
unless the hive be strong, the number of bees is apt to dwindle down so much that 
they cannot keep, up the requisite temperature for hatching. Although this exper- 
iment be not absolutely conclusive, still there is the presumption that the instinct 
of the bees would not so far err as to lead them to attempt to develope a queen 
from a drone larva, if this, in the nature of things, was not possible. The point 
can be fully determined only by further experiment. 
The above experiments were not made with the view of establishing a conver- 
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