BEE-spoke-data/bees-v0 huggingface dataset:
T know that all this will appear to many much more like romance than sober reality; but believing that it is a serine for any observer willfully to misstate or conceal important truths, I have determined, in writing this book,to give facts however wonderful, just as they are ; confident that in due time they will be universally received ; and hoping that the many wonders in the economy of the honey-bee, will not only excite a wider interest in its culture, but lead those who observe them to adhere the wisdom of Him who gave them such admirable instinets.
The fertility of the queen-bee has been entirely underestimated by most writers. During the height of the breeding season, she will often under favorable circumstances, lay from two to three thousand eggs a day! In my observing-hives, I have seen her lay at the rate of six eggs a minute. The fecundity of the female of the white ant is, however, much greater than this, being at the rate of sixty eggs a minute ; but her eggs are simply extruded from her body, and carried by the workers into suitable nurseries, while the queen-bee herself deposits her eggs in their appropriate cells.
It has been noticed that the queen-bee usually commences laying very early in the season, and always long before there are any males in the live. How then, are her eggs impregnated? Francis IIuber; of Geneva, by a long course of the most indefatigable observations, throw much light upon this subject. Before stating his discoveries, I must pay my humble tribute of gratitude and admiration to this wonderful man. It is mortifying to every naturalist, and I might add, to every honest man acquainted with the facts, to hear such an Apinarian, as Huber, abused by the veriest novices and imposters ; while others who are indebted to his labors for nearly all that is of value in their works,
"Dann with faint praise, nascent with civil beer,
And without sneering, touch the rest to ener."
Huber in early manhood lost the use of his eyes. His opponents imagine that to state this fleet, is to diseredit all his observations. But to make their case still stronger, they assert that his servant, Francis Burnens, by whose aid he conducted his experiments, was only an ignorant peasant. Now this so-called "ignorant peasant" was a man of strong native intellect, possessing the indefatigable energy and enthusiasm so indispensable to a good observer. He was a noble specimen of a self-made man, and rose to be the chief magistrate in the village where he resided. Huber has paid an admirable tribute to his intelligence, fidelity, indomitable patience, energy and skill.* It would be difficult to find in any language a better specimen of the inductive system of reasoning, than Huber's work on bees, and it might be studied as a model of the only way of investigating nature, so as to arrive at reliable results. Huber was assisted in his researches, not only by Burnens, but by his own wife, to whom he was betrothed before the loss of his sight, and who nobly persisted in marrying him, notwithstanding his misfortune and the strenuous dissuasions of her friends. They lived longer than the ordinary term of human life in the enjoyment of great domestic happiness, and the amiable naturalist through her assiduous attentions scarcely felt the loss of his sight. Milton is believed by many to have been a better poet in consequence of his blindness; and it is highly probable that Huber was a better Aplarian from the same cause. His active yet reflective mind demanded constant employment; and he found in the study of the habits of the honey-bee, full scope for his powers. All the observationsand experiments of his faithful assistants being daily reported, many inquiries and suggestions were made by him, which might not have suggested themselves had he possessed the use of his eyes.
* Few, like him, have such command of both time and money as to be able to prosecute on so grand a scale, for a series of years, the most costly experiments. Having repeatedly verified his most important observations, I take great delight in holding him up to my countrymen as the Prince of Ariarians.
To return to his discoveries on the impregnation of the queen-bee. By a long course of careful experiments, he ascertained that, like many other insects, she was teundated in the open air and on the wing; and that the influence of this connection lasts for several years, and probably for life. He could, however, form no satisfactory conjecture how eggs were fertilized which were not yet developed in her ovaries. Years ago, the celebrated Dr. John Hunter, and others, supposed that there must be a permanent receptacle for the male sperm, opening into the oviduct. Dzierzon, who must be regarded as one of the ablest contributors of modern times to Apriarian science, maintains this opinion, and states that he has found such a receptacle filled with a fluid resembling the semen of the drones. He does not seem to have demonstrated his discoveries by any microscopic examinations.
In the Winter of 1851-2, I submitted for scientific examination several queen-bees to Dr. Joseph Leidy, of Philadelphia, who has the highest reputation both at home and abroad, as a naturalist and microseopic anatomist. He found in making his dissetions a small globular sac, about \(
rac{1}{3}\) of an inch in diameter, communicating with the oviduct, and filled with a whitish fluid; this fluid, when examined under the microscope, abounded in the spermatozoa which characterizes the seminal fluid. A comparison of this substance, later in the season, with the semen of a drone, proved them to be exactly alike.
These examinations have settled, on the impregnable basis of demonstration, the mode in which the eggs of the queen are vivified.. In descending the oviduct to be deposited in the cells, they pass by the mouth of this seminal sac, or "_germacheea_," and receive a portion of its fertilizing contents. Small as it is, it contains sufficient to impregnate hundreds of thousands of eggs. In precisely the same way, the mother-wasps and hornets are decundated. The females only of these insects survive the Winter, and often a single one begins the construction of a nest, in which at first only a few eggs are deposited. How could these eggs hatch, if the females had not been impregnated the previous season? Dissection proves that they have a spermatheea similar to that of the queen-bee. It never seems to have occurred to the opponents of Huber, that the existence of a permanently impregnated mother-wasp is quite as difficult to be accounted for, as the existence of a similarly impregnated queen-bee.
The celebrated Swammerdam, in his observations upon insects, made in the latter part of the seventeenth century, has given a highly magnified drawing of the ovaries of the queen-bee, a reduced copy of which I present (Plate XVIII), to my readers. The small globular sac (\(D\)), communicating with the _oviduct_ (\(E\)), which he thought secreted a fluid for sticking the egg to the base of the cells, is the seminal reservoir, or spermatheca. Any one who will carefully dissect a queen-bee, may see this sac, even with the naked eye.
It will be seen that the ovaries (\(G\) and \(H\)) are double, each consisting of an amazing number of ducts* filled with eggs, which gradually increase in size.+
Footnote : margin: \(\star\) The ducts in this ext are represented as more numerous than those in Wsammardam's drawing.
Huber, while experimenting to ascertain how the queen was decundated, confined some young ones to their hives, by contracting the entrances, so that they were more than three weeks old before they could go in search of the drones. To his amazement, the queens whose impregnation was thus retarded never laid any eggs but such as produced drones!
He tried this experiment repeatedly, but always with the same result. Bee-keepers, even from the time of Aristotle, had observed that all the brood in a hive were occasionally drones. Before attempting to explain this astonishing fact, I must call the attention of the reader to another of the mysteries of the bee-hive.
It has already been stated, that the workers are proved, by dissection to be females which under ordinary circumstances are barren. Occasionally, some of them appear to be sufficiently developed to be capable of laying eggs; but these eggs, like those of queens whose impregnation has been retarded, always produce drones! Some
times, when a colony which has lost its queen despairs of obtaining another, these drone-laying workers are exalted to her place, and treated with equal regard by the bees. I'Huber ascertained that fertile workers are usually reared in the neighborhood of the young queens, and thought that they received some particles of the peculiar food or jelly on which these queens are fed. He did not pretend to account for the effect on the queen of retarded impregnation; and made no experiments on the foundation of fertile workers.
Since the publication of Huber's work more than sixty years ago, no light has been shed upon the mysteries of drone-laying queens and workers, until quite recently. Dzierzon appears to have been the first to ascertain the truth on this subject; and his discovery must certainly be ranked among the most astonishing's fhets in all the range of animated nature. It seems at first view so absolutely incredible, that I should not dare mention it, if it were not supported by indubitable evidence, and if I had not determined to state all important and well ascertained facets, however contrary to the prejudices of the ignorant and conceited.
Dzierzon asserts that all impregnated eggs produce females, either workers or queens; and all unimpregnated ones, males or drones! He states that in several of his halves he found drone-laying queens, whose wings were so imperfect that they could not fly, and which on examination proved to be unfeaturedated. Hence, he concluded that the eggs laid by the queen-bee and fertile worker had, from the previous impregnation of the egg from which they sprung, sufficient vitality to produee the drone, which is a less highly organized insect than the queen or worker. It had long been known that the queen deposits drone-egg in the large or drone-cells, and worker-ceggs in the small or worker-cells, and that she makes no mistakes. Dzieron inferred, therefore, that there was some way in which she was able to decide the sex of the egg before it was laid, and that she must have such a control over the mouth of the seminal sac as to be able to extrude her eggs, allowing them at will to receive or not a portion of its fertilizing contents. In this way, he thought she determined their sex,'according to the size of the cells in which she laid them.
My friend, Mr. Samuel Wagner, of York, Pennsylvania, has advanced a highly ingenious theory, which accounts for all the facts, without admitting that the queen has any special knowledge or will on the subject. He supposes that when she deposits her eggs in the worker-cells, her body is slightly compressed by their size, thus causing the eggs as they pass the spermatheca to receive its vivifying influence. On the contrary, when she is laying in drone-cells, as this compression cannot take place, the mouth of the spermatheca is kept closed, and the eggs are necessarily unfeecnulated.
In the Autumn of 1852, my assistant found a young queen whose progeny consisted entirely of drones. The colony had been formed by removing a few combs containing bees, brood, and eggs, from another hive, and had raised a new queen. Some eggs were found in one of the combs, and young bees were already emerging from the cells, all of which were drones. As there were none but worker-cells in the hive, they were reared in them, and not having space for full development, they were dwarfed in size, although the bees had pieced the cells to give more room to their occupants.
I was not only surprised to find drones reared in worker-cells, but equally so that a young queen, who at first lays only the eggs of workers, should be laying drone-eggs;and at once conjectured that this was a case of an unimpregrated drone-laying queen, sufficient time not having elapsed for her impregnation to be unnaturally retarded. All necessary precautions were taken to determine this point. The queen was removed from the hive, and although her wings appeared to be perfect, she could not fly. It seemed probable, therefore,'that she had never been able to leave the hive for impregnation.
To settle the question beyond the possibility of doubt, I submitted this queen to Professor Leidy for microescopic examination. The following is an extract from his report. "The ovaries were filled with eggs, the poison-sae full of fluid; and the spermatheca. distended. with a perfectly colorless, transparent, viscid liquid, _without a trace of spermatologyoa_."
This examination demonstrates Dzierzon's theory that queens do not need impregnation to lay the eggs of males.
Considerable doubt seemed to rest on the accuracy of Dzierzon's statements on this subject, chiefly because of his having hazardsed the unfortunate conjecture that the place of the poison-bag in the worker is occupied in the queen by the spermatheca. Now this is so completely contrary to fact (Pl. XVIII, \(A_{i},D\)), that it was a natural inference that this acute and thoroughly honest observer made no microscopic dissections of the insects which he examined. I consider myself peculiarly fortunate, in have obtained the aid of a naturalist so celebrated for microscopic dissections as Dr. Leidy.
On examining this same colony a few days later, I found satisfactory evidence that these drone-eggs were laid by the queen which had been removed. No fresh eggs had been deposited in the cells, and the bees on missing her had begun to build royal cells, to rear, if possible, another queen;"this they would not have done, if a fertile worker had been present, by which the drone-eggs had been deposited.
Another interesting fact proves that _all_ the eggs laid by this queen were drone-eggs. Two of the royal cells were in a short time discontinued; while a third was sealed over in the usual way, to undergo its changes to a perfect queen. As the bees had only a drone-laying queen, whence came the female egg from which they were rearing a queen?
At first I imagined that they might have stolen it from another hive; but on opening this cell it contained only _a dead drone!_ Huber had described a similar mistake made by some of his bees. At the base of this cell was an unusual quantity of the peculiar jelly fed to develop young queens. One might almost imagine that the bees had dosed the unfortunate drone to death; as though they hoped by such liberal feeding to produce a change in his sexual organization.
In the Summer of 1854, I found another drone-laying queen in my Apiracy, with wings so _shrivelled_ that she could not fly. I gave her successively to several queensless colonies, in all of which she deposited only drone-eggs. On the 14th of July, 1855, a queen in one of my observing-lives began to lay, when nine days old, a few eggs on the edges of the combs, instead, of in the cells. She persisted in this for some days, until I transferred her to a colony which had been queenless for some weeks, hoping that she might, if unimpregnated, make an excursion from their hive to meet the drones. The observing-hive in which she was hatched was exposed to the full light of day; the entrance small, and difficult to find; and I had noticed on several occasions, that when the drones left the hive in the greatest numbers, the queen seemed unable to find her way out. At such times she manifested "anusualexcitement, and the whole colony were almost as much agitated as though they were swarming. After she had been in the second hive a short time, I found that she had laid a number of drone-eggs. They were deposited near the bottom and edge of the eomh, in cells a little larger than the worker-size, and which the bees had begun to lengthen, to adapt them to the growth of their occupants. There was no other brood in the hive. On the 9th of August, I found the combs nearly filled with worker-brood, in a state considerably _less advanced_ than the drones. Is there any reason to doubt that these drone-eggs were laid by the queen before, and the worker-eggs after her impregnation?
In Italy there is a variety of the honey-bee differing in size and color from the common kind. If a queen of this variety is crossed with the common drones, her drone-progeny will be _Italian_, and her worker-brood a cross between the two; thus showing that the kind of drones she will produce has no dependence on the male by which she is decundated.
It appears from recent discoveries in physiology, that to impregnate the ovum of an animal it is necessary that the spermatozoa should not simply come in contact with it, but actually enter into it through a small opening. In applying this discovery to bees, Prof. Sicbold, of Germany, dissected a number of worker-eggs, and found in each from one to three spermatozoa; while he found none in dissecting drone-eggs.
Dr. Donhoff, of Germany, in the Summer of 1855, reared a worker-larvae from a drone-egg,* which he had artificially impregnated.
Aristotle noticed, more than 2,000 years ago, that the eggs which produce drones are like the worker-eggs. With the aid of powerful microscopes we are still unable to detect any difference in the size or appearance of the eggs of the queen.
These facts taken in connection, appear to constitute a perfect demonstration that unfeatured queens are not only able to lay eggs, but that their eggs have sufficient vitality to produce drones.
It seems to me probable, that after fecundation has been delayed for about three weeks, the organs of the queen-bee are in such a condition that it can no longer be effected ; just as the parts of a flower, after a certain time, wither and shut up, and the plant becomes incapable of frectification. Perhaps, after a certain time, the queen loses all desire to go in search of the male. The fertile drone-laying workers would seem to be physically incapable of impregnation.
There is something analogous to these wonders, in the "_apidides_," or green llee, which infest plants. We have undoubted evidence that a fecundated female gives birth to other females, and they in turn to others, all of which without impregnation are able to bring forth young; until, after a number of generations, perfect males and females are produced, and the series starts anew!
However improbable it may appear that an unimpregnated egg can give birth to a living being, or that sex can depend on impregnation, we are not at liberty to reject fhets because we cannot comprehend the reasons of them. Ife who allows himself to be guilty of such folly, if he aims to be consistent, must eventually be plunged into the dreary gulf of athelsm. Common sense, philosophy, and religion alike teach us to receive, with becoming "reference, all undoubtedly - facts, whether in the natural or spiritual world ; assured that however mysterious they may appear to us, they are beautifully consistent in the sight of Him whose " understanding is infinite.".
All the leading facts in the breeding of bees ought to be as familiar to the Apiarian, as the same class of facts in the rearing of his domestic animals." A few crude and half-digested notions, however satisfactory to the old-fashioned bee-keeper, will no longer meet the wants of those who desire to conduct bee-culture on an extended and profitable system.
The extrordinary fertility of the queen-bee has already been noticed. The process of laying has been well described by the Rev. W. Dunbar, a Scotch Apiarian.
" When the queen is about to lay, she puts her head into a cell, and remains in that position for a second or two, to ascertain its fitness for the deposit she is about to make. She then withdraws her head, and, carrying her body downwards,1 inserts the lower part of it into the cell: in a few seconds she turns half round upon herself and withdraws, leaving an egg behind her. When she plays a considerable number, she does it equally on each side of the comb, those on the one side being as exactly opposite to those on the other as the relative position of the cells will admit. The effect of this is to produce the utmost possible concentration and economy of heat for developing the various changes of the brood!"
Here, as at every step in the economy of the bee, we beh\(\delta\)d\({}_{i}\) in the perfect adaptation of means to ends, a sagacity which seems scarcely inferior to that of man.
"The eggs of bees" are of a lengthened, oval shape (PI. XIII, Fig. 39), with a slight curvature, and of a bluish white color : being bessmeared, at the time of laying, with a glutinous substance, they adhere to the bases of the cells, and remain unenhanced in figure or situation for three or four days; they are then hatched, the bottom of each cell presenting to view a small white worn. On its growing (PI. XIII, Figs. 40, 41), so as to touch the opposite angle of the cell, it coils itself up, to use the language of Swummerdam, like a dog when going to sleep; and floats in a whitish transparent fluid, which is deposited in the cells by the nursing-bees, and by which it is probably nourished; it becomes gradually enlarged in its dimensions, till the two extremities touch one another, and form a ring. In this state it is called a larva, or worm. So nicely do the bees calculate the quantity of food which will be"required, that none remains in the cell when it is transformed to a nymph. It is the opinion of many eminent naturalists, that farina does not constitute the sole food of the larva, but that it consists of a mixture of farina, honey, and water, partly digested in the stomachs of the nursing-bees.
"The larva having derived its support, in the manner above described, for four, five, or six days, according to the season, continues to increase during that period, till it occupies the whole breadth, and nearly the length of the cell. The nursing-bees now seal over the cell with a light brown cover, externally more or less convex (the cap of a drone-cell being more convex than that of a worker), and thus differing from that of a honey-cell, which is paler and somewhat concave." The cap of the brood
cell is made not of pure wax, but of a mixture of beech bread and wax; and appears under the microscope to be full of fine holes, to give air to the inelosed insect. From its texture and shape it is easily thrust off by the bee when mature, whereas if it consisted wholly of wax, the insect would either perish for lack of air, or be unable to force its way into the world. Both the material and shape of the lids which close the honey-cells are different: they are of pure wax, and thus air-tight, to prevent the honey from souring or candying in the cells; and are slightly concave, the better to resist the pressure of their contents.
To return to Bevan. "The larva is no sooner perfectly inelosed than it begins to line the cell by spinning round itself, after the manner of the silk-worm (PL XIII, Fig. 42), a whitish silky film, or cocoon, by which it is encased, as it were, in a pod. When it has undergone this change, it has usually borne the name of _nymph_, or _popa_. It has now attained its full growth, and the large amount of nutriment which it has taken serves as a store for developing the perfect insect.
"The _eorking bee-nyinph_ spins its cocoon in thirty-six hours. After passing about three days in this state of preparation for a new existence, it gradually undergoes so great a change (PL XIII, Fig. 43), as not to wear a vestige of its previous form.
"When it has reached the twenty-first day of its existence, counting from the time the egg is laid, it comes forth a perfect winged insect. The cocoon is left behind, and forms a closely attached and exact lining to the cell in which it was spun; by this means the breeding cells become smaller, and their partitions stronger, the oftener they change their tenants; and may become so much diminished in size as not to admit of the perfect development of full-sized bees.