Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/508

492 was the first to observe in its details. It was seen through a glass table, upon which a hive, deprived of its bottom-board, was placed. He also ascertained that the massacre never takes place unless the swarm possesses a fertile queen, and the swarming-season is over.

By aid of the microscope, Huber proved that the queen-bee is truly oviparous—that her eggs are true eggs. He saw the worm grow to maturity within the transparent walls of the egg, rend the pellicle, and emerge. The idea that workers brood the eggs he also dispelled, by repeated observation of the fact that the eggs hatch equally well when removed from the care of the bees, and that the workers frequently enter empty cells and remain quietly there, evidently taking repose.

His observations upon the spinning of the cocoon were made through the walls of blown-glass cells, into which the egg was removed. The drones and common bees spin complete cocoons; the royal larva, on the contrary, spins an imperfect one, enveloping the head and thorax, but reaching only to the second ring of the abdomen. This is evidently the result, not of any peculiar instinct, but of the conformation of the cell, for the royal cocoon is complete if it be spun in a common cell. In ordinary cases, if the royal cocoon were complete, it would be impossible for a queen to destroy her rivals in the state of pupæ.

By repeated experiment, he showed that the size of a cell has no modifying effect upon the development of a bee, except by retarding its growth, if it be too small: a common bee is the same size, whether reared in drone or worker cells. In determining this point, many interesting facts in regard to the instinct of queens and workers were ascertained. A fertile queen refused to lay worker-eggs in drone-cells, though evidently oppressed with them: when, however, he introduced worker-cells, artificially supplied with a drone-brood, the bees emptied the cells, and the queen laid in them, five or six eggs in each. With his usual judicial fairness, Huber remarks upon this inconsistency in the instinct of queens. They refuse to lay drone-eggs in worker-cells, and yet here is a queen which deposits five or six eggs in a single cell; the drone-egg in the worker-cell would produce a small though perfect drone; the five or six worker-eggs in the same cell, if they all remained there, would produce nothing.

Huber concludes, from a number of experiments made in this direction, that, though the queen knows what kind of egg she is about to lay, and so deposits it always in the proper cell, yet she does not determine the sex of the egg, as is believed by many of the most distinguished modern apiarians. He also found that it is impossible to compel bees to rear a worker in a common cell, if it has been supplied with royal jelly. If the colony be queenless, they enlarge the cell into a royal cell; and, if they already possess a sovereign, they destroy the worm and devour the royal jelly.