Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/510

494 to be ignorant of the mistake made when a drone-laying queen deposits her egg in a royal cell, and dose the poor fellow to death, trying to make a queen of him. In his investigation upon workers, Huber discovered that they were of two kinds, wax-workers and nurse-bees: the former are larger and stronger, and possess more perfect organs for the secretion of wax than the latter, though no other difference can be detected, and this seems merely the result of being reared in smaller cells.

Swammerdam states that a blind or mutilated queen ceases to lay, and that the workers of her hive no longer continue their labors, or make any collections, as if aware that it is useless to do so; but Huber shows that this is not wholly true. One queen deprived of her four wings, and another of one antenna, continued to lay and to receive the homage of her subjects as before: but the amputation of both antennæ produced very different results. Queens, drones, and workers, when deprived of both antennæ lose their instincts, and seem to be subject to a kind of delirium. They wander aimlessly about, are unable to direct the proboscis for the reception of food, seek the door of the hive, and soon perish. A fertile queen, besides these symptoms, which are common to all under the deprivation, drops her eggs about the comb, and manifests no recognition of, or hostility to, another mutilated queen.

The first part of Huber's work here concludes with some valuable suggestions in practical apiculture. The observations in the second part were made by the aid, first, of his wife, and afterward by his son, Pierre Huber, so well known through his investigations upon ants.

In the year 1809, a bee made its appearance before one of Huber's hives, which seemed to differ from its rightful inhabitants only by a darker and less downy coat. Violent contests took place every day between the native and the alien bees. Aristotle mentions "a black bee which is called a thief," but Huber seems never to have heard this suggestion, and supposed them to differ from his own bees in some physical particulars. He, therefore, submitted them to Mdlle. Jurine for dissection, and she discovered not only in them, but in all workers, ovaries—a fact which entirely overturned the theory of neuters which had held its ground for so many centuries. The worker is not sexless, but is an imperfectly-developed female. This discovery throws some light upon the wonderful change made by physical conditions in the development of the worker-larvæ. With ordinary cell and food, the worm develops into an insect possessed of feminine instincts, in the provision which she makes for the young, and for the future needs of the swarm; while, with the larger cell and different food, the same larva would develop into a physically perfect female, which, at the same time, is wanting in all maternal instincts—a divergence which is undoubtedly one of the most marvelous in Nature, but a divergence only, not a contradiction!