Page:Jardine Naturalist's library Bees.djvu/94

90 the new nutriment may cause to grow in all directions. It furnishes a surprising evidence of the slow degrees by which scientific facts make their way, if not essential to general utility, when we consider that to this day, the knowledge of this singularity in the natural history of this insect, is confined almost exclusively to apiarians, and even rejected by some of them. It has, however, been confirmed by so many experiments instituted by many different individuals, that no unprejudiced mind can withhold its assent from its truth. Extraordinary, however, as this fact is, it is not more so than many others which have not attracted our particular notice, merely because they are familiar to us. "If we preserve the seed of a plant," says Feburier, "for a series of years, and supply it with different nourishment and soil, and bestow upon it different treatment from that which was destined for it by nature, we destroy its powers of fecundity; the flower no longer possesses pistils or stamina, petals replace them, and announce the sterility of the plant." Something analogous to this holds true, it is said, in the case of one of our domestic quadrupeds. We find the twin-calf, stinted as it has been for room in the ovarium of its mother, and the recipient of but half the nourishment which would otherwise have fallen to its share, becomes in after years a barren cow. In the case of the bee, "the egg of a worker, placed in a royal cell, only produces an insect which has its powers more fully developed, in proportion to the ampler space which it occupies, but it acquires no new powers. The germ of the ovary