Figure 2
The entrance appears at the bottom of each frame. All should be close but 1 and 12. However it is necessary that they should open at pleasure.
The hive is partly open, fig. 3. and shews how the component parts may be united by hinges, and open as the leaves of a book. The two covers closing up the sides, a. a.
Figure 3
[Fig. 4.] is another view of fig. 1. a a. a piece of comb to guide the bees; b b. pegs disposed so as to retain the comb properly in the frame; c c. parts of two shelves; the one above is fixed, and keeps the comb in a vertical position; the under one, which is moveable, supports it below.
[C] I cannot insist that my readers, the better to comprehend what is here said, shall peruse the Memoirs of M. de Reaumur on Bees, and those of the Lusace Society; but I must request them to examine the extracts in M. Bonnet's works, tom. 5. 4to edit. and tom. 10. 8vo, where they will find a short and distinct abstract of all that naturalists have hitherto discovered on the subject.
[D] Vide M. Schirach's History of Bees, in a memoir by M. Hattorf, entitled, Physical Researches whether the Queen Bee requires fecundation by Drones?
[E] It will afterwards appear that what we took for the generative fluid, was the male organs of generation, left by copulation in the body of the female. This discovery we owe to a circumstance that shall immediately be related. Perhaps I should avoid prolixity, by suppressing all my first observations on the impregnation of the queen, and by passing directly to the experiments that prove she carries away the genital organs; but in such observations which are both new and delicate, and where it is so easy to be deceived, I think service is done to the reader by a candid avowal of my errors. This is an additional proof to so many others, of the absolute necessity that an observer should repeat all his experiments a thousand times, to obtain the certainty of seeing facts as they really exist.