Some of these must be enumerated. The abdomen of the worker is
comparatively short and rounded: that of the queen is larger and longer,
and comes to a fairly sharp point. The jaws of the queen are notched on
their inner cutting edge: the worker’s jaws are smooth like the edge of a
knife. The tongue of the worker has a spatula at its extremity, and is
furnished with sensitive hairs: the tongue of the queen is shorter, the
spatula is smaller, while the hairs show greater length. The worker-bee
has a complicated system of wax-secreting discs under the horny plates of
her abdomen: in the queen these are absent, nor can the most elementary
trace of them be discovered. In their nerve-systems the two show
difference, the queen possessing only four abdominal ganglia, while the
worker has five. The queen’s sting is curved, and longer than the
worker’s: the sting of the worker-bee is perfectly straight. On their
hind-legs the workers have a curious contrivance which bee-keepers have
named the pollen-basket. It is a hollowing of the thigh, the cavity
being surrounded with stiff hairs; and within this the pollen is packed
and carried home to the hive. In the queen both the cavity and the hairs
are absent. Her colour also is generally different from that of the
worker-bee, her legs, in particular, being a much redder brown.
Here is a problem for our great biologists—a problem, however, at which
the plain, every-day man may well flinch. For we seem to have come face
to face with new principles of organic life, facts incompatible with the
accepted ideas of the inevitable relation between cause and effect. The
irresistible tendency at this stage is to hark back; to repeat the
experiment of the transposed eggs, and see whether no vital, initial
circumstance has been overlooked. But the result is always the same.
Nor can the most careful microscopical dissection of the eggs themselves
reveal any differences. In this mystery of the structural variance
between queen and worker, it would seem that we are forced to accept one
of three alternatives. Either the egg contains two distinct germs of
life, one developing only under the stress of hard times, the other only
to the call of luxury. Or we must go back to mediæval notions, and
believe that the worker-bees give or withhold some vital principle of
their own during nurturing operations. Or we must give up the problem,
and decide that creation works on lines very different from those on
which we have hitherto grounded our faith.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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