April, ’18] 
HOWARD AND FRANCE: BEE FERTILIZATION 
265 
FERTILIZATION OF QUEEN BEES 
By C. W. Howard and L. V. France, University Farm , St. Paul, Minn. 
The possibility of controlling the fertilization of queen bees has been 
in the minds of beekeepers for many years. From time to time it has 
been brought about under artificial conditions, the life of the queen 
being thereafter perfectly normal and in accordance with that of one 
fertilized by a male in the usual manner. Several stories have come 
to the writers stating that the queen could be taken at the time she was 
leaving the hive, held between the fingers of one hand while the organs 
of a mature drone were pressed out with the fingers of the other and 
the mass of spermatic fluid which exuded dropped into the open ex¬ 
tremity of the queen. Fertilization took place in an apparently normal 
manner and the queen was accepted by her colony and remained alive 
one or two seasons producing worker brood in large quantity. In the 
reports of the U. S. Department of Agriculture for 1885 and 1886 and 
of the U. S. Commissioner of Agriculture for 1887 are reports of various 
methods adopted in attempts to artificially fertilize queen bees. A 
large number of successes were claimed. The method followed was 
that described above and queens from one to fifteen days old were used. 
In the American Bee Journal in November, 1878, appeared a third 
report by Mr. J. Hasbrouck, in which he claimed to be able to cause 
queens and drones to mate when confined in small glass boxes. 
This work done between 1885 and 1887 seems to have been discred¬ 
ited. The possibility of accomplishing this feat was again broached 
by Professor Francis Jager in 1914 and the senior author was asked 
to cooperate in the work. In the number of Science for November 13, 
1914, a preliminary report upon a successful case of artificial fertiliza¬ 
tion was published. Since that time the writers have attempted to 
successfully repeat the experiment, but have almost uniformly failed. 
The advantages, both to the practical beekeeper and the student of 
genetics, if this could be done are obvious and need not be detailed here. 
The queen bee reported on in Science in 1914 wintered in good condi¬ 
tion, but soon after removal to the open in the following spring she 
began to lay drone eggs as well as worker eggs and finally produced ex¬ 
clusively drone eggs. After this had continued for three weeks she was 
killed and the contents of the spermatheca examined. It was packed 
with live active spermatozoa, showing conclusively that fertilization 
had taken place. If left alive she would have probably soon resumed 
the production of worker eggs. 
During the summers of 1915 and 1916, 55 duplicates of this experi- 
