40 
THE HIVE AND IIONET-BEE. 
bad been present, by wbich tlie drone-eggs bad been de¬ 
posited. 
Another interesting fact proves that the eggs laid 
by this queen were drone-eggs. Two of the royal cells 
were in a short time discontinued; while a third was 
sealed over in the usual way, to undergo its changes to a 
perfect queen. As the bees had only a drone-laying 
queen, whence came the female egg from which they 
were rearing a queen ? 
At first I imagined that they might have stolen it from 
an other hive; but on opening this cell it contained only a 
dead drone! Huber had described a similar mistake made 
by some of his bees. At the base of this cell was an unu¬ 
sual quantity of the peculiar jelly fed to develop young 
queens. One might almost imagine that the bees had 
dosed the unfortunate drone to death; as though they 
hoped by such liberal feeding to produce a change in his 
sexual organization. 
In the Summer of 18.')4, I found another drone-laying 
queen in my Ajjiary, with wings so shrivelled that she 
could not fly. I gave her successively to several queen- 
le.ss colonies, in all of which she deposited only dron e-eggs. 
On the 14th of July, 1855, a queen in one of my observ- 
iug-hives began to lay, when nine days old, a few eggs on 
the edges of the combs, instead of in the cells. She per¬ 
sisted in this for some days, until I transferred her to a 
colony which had been queenless for some weeks, hoping 
that she might, if unimpregnated, make an excursion from 
their hive to meet the drones. The observing-hive in 
which she was hatched was exposed to the full light oi 
day; the entrance small, and difficult to find; and I had 
noticed on several occasions, that when the drones left 
the hive in the greatest numbers, the queen seemed un¬ 
able to find her way out. At such times she manifested 
