Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/828

808 with the outside world, and doubtless with more wisdom and less conceit.

The third and last rightful denizen of a perfect colony of bees is the unsophisticated, stingless, but much abused drone—the male bee. He is well named, however, being a very liberal feeder with excellent digestive organs for honey, and with no duties whatever within the hive further than the incidental one of contributing by the presence of his cumbrous corporation to the animal heat of the hive. As to his natural longevity, nobody from Virgil to Huber, Langstroth, Quinby, Newman, Cook, Jones, et alii, seems to know much about it. The matter not being invested with any importance, no investigator seems to have bothered his head much with it. So far as I could ever see, the drone seems to live and thrive admirably until he is either killed off by the workers, starved to death, or gallantly yields up his life in performing his sole function, which he invariably does in the performance of this function in the act of copulation. The drone, as Dr. Dzeirzon established, comes from an unimpregnated egg—the virgin queen, and sometimes even workers, being able to lay eggs which will produce drones. As a rule, drones are found in colonies whenever they are needed, or likely to be needed to impregnate the young queens, which is usually during the swarming season and honey harvest. Though they are promptly ejected from strong colonies when not needed, and the honey-flow fails, they are tolerated in queenless colonies, and are sometimes wintered over. The drone is much larger than the worker, and his cell very protuberant, and in it he spends twenty-four days from the egg before he emerges.

As remarked at the outset, bee-culture made but little progress on scientific principles for thousands of years. It is only within the last half-century or so that it has, under the magical talisman of science, fairly leaped forward like every other pursuit. The first great achievement was the application of the centrifugal force in the construction of the honey-extractor, thus enabling us to get the honey in its purity out of the comb without injuring the latter, when it can be returned to the bees to be refilled. A German (Herr von Aruschka) accomplished this, and thereby gave a great impetus to bee-culture. Indeed, the invention of the movable frame and the honey-extractor completely revolutionized the modus operandi of bee-keeping. As to who is really entitled to the credit of inventing the movable frame, there is some uncertainty and a conflict of claims. The truth seems to be that some three or four different persons are fairly entitled to credit—each, it would appear, having conceived and developed the idea, more or less independently of the others. Huber and Schmidt in Germany, Munn in England, M. de Beauvoys in France, and Langstroth in the United States, are all fairly though not equally entitled to credit, and each has placed progressive bee-culture under tribute. Mr, Langstroth, however, seems entitled to much more credit than any of the others,