LETTERS ON ENTOMOLOGY. 65 
and an upright instead of a horizontal posture 
(which is the form of a royal cell), give the bee 
a different tongue, make its hind legs flat in- 
stead of concave, deprive them of the fringe of 
hairs winch forms the basket for carrying pollen; 
besides almost every other part of the body ? Can 
we imagine that these seemingly unimportant 
circumstances can alter all its instincts and pro- 
pensities, and that instead of a lively, industrious 
worker, it would become an indolent, tyrannical 
queen ? If this circumstance was not established 
by the most credible evidence, it would be almost 
impossible to believe it, ignorant as we are of the 
general laws of nature. The first who published 
it was M. Schirach, secretary of the Apiarian So- 
ciety in Upper Lusatia. It was communicated to the 
celebrated Bonnet, who long hesitated to believe 
it, but was at length convinced ; and M. Huber, 
by experiments repeated for ten years, was fully 
convinced of the truth of it. Indeed it had been 
practically known long before, for M. Vogel 
asserts, that experiments confirming this extra- 
ordinary fact had been made by more than a 
hundred different persons in the course of more 
than a hundred years, and that he had known 
old cultivators of bees who had assured him that 
if proper measures were taken, in a practice of 
