If bees are to be made to enter a new hive, by removing the old one from
its stand, it will always be very desirable not only to have the new one
contain a piece of comb, but a considerable number of bees _clustered_
on that comb. I repeatedly found my bees, after entering the hive,
refuse to have anything to do with the brood comb, and for a long time,
I was unable to conjecture the cause; until I ascertained that they were
dissatisfied with its deserted appearance, and that, by taking the
precaution to have it well covered with bees, I seldom failed to
reconcile them to my system of forced colonization. I can usually tell,
in less than two minutes, whether the operation will succeed or not. If
the returning bees are content, they will, however much agitated at
first, soon begin to join the cluster on the comb; while if they are
dissatisfied, they will abandon the hive, and nearly all the bees that
were originally on the comb, will leave with them. They seem capricious
in this matter, and are sometimes so very self-willed, that they refuse
to have anything to do with the brood comb, when I can see no good
reason why they should be so rebellious.
I shall here state some _conjectures_ which have occurred to me on this
subject. Is it absolutely certain that bees can raise a queen from _any_
egg or young larva which would produce a worker? Or if this is possible,
is it certain that _any kind of workers_ can accomplish this? Huber
ascertained to his own satisfaction that there were two kinds of workers
in a hive. He thus describes them.
"One of these is, in general, destined for the elaboration of wax, and
its size is considerably enlarged when full of honey; the other
immediately imparts what it has collected to its companions, its abdomen
undergoes no sensible change, or it retains only the honey necessary for
its own subsistence. The particular function of the bees of this kind is
to take care of the young, for they are not charged with provisioning
the hive. In opposition to the wax workers, we shall call them small
bees or nurses."
"Although the external difference be inconsiderable, this is not an
imaginary distinction. Anatomical observations prove that the capacity
of the stomach is not the same--experiments have ascertained that one of
the species cannot fulfil all the functions shared among the workers of
a hive. We painted those of each class with different colors, in order
to study their proceedings; and these were not interchanged. In another
experiment, after supplying a hive deprived of a queen with brood and
pollen, we saw the small bees quickly occupied in nutrition of the
larvæ, while those of the wax working class neglected them. Small bees
also produce wax, but in a very inferior quantity to what is elaborated
by the real wax workers."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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