Effect of Retarded Impregnation on the Queen Bee.
I shall now mention a fact in the physiology of the Queen Bee, more singular than any which has yet been related.
Huber, while experimenting to ascertain how the Queen was fecundated, confined some of his young Queens to their hives, by contracting the entrances, so that they were not able to go in search of the drones, until three weeks after their birth. To his amazement, these Queens whose impregnation was thus unnaturally retarded, never laid any eggs but such as produced drones!!
He tried the experiment again and again, but always with the same result. Some Bee-Keepers, long before his time, had observed that all the brood in a hive were occasionally drones, and of course, that such colonies rapidly went to ruin. Before attempting any explanation of this astonishing fact, I must call the attention of the reader, to another of the mysteries of the Bee-Hive,