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If I should ever learn anything about this delicate point, I shall owe it to some happy chance for which I must wait, or rather watch, patiently. Towards the end of my investigations, I heard of a German theory which relates to the Hive-bee and comes from Dzierzon, the apiarist. The males are supposed to proceed from non-fertilized eggs, the females from fertilized eggs.
Some years of silence followed these revelations; but soon a German clergyman, Dzierzon, discovered parthenogenesis, i. e. the virginal parturition of queens, and contrived the first hive with movable combs, thereby enabling the bee-keeper henceforth to take his share of the harvest of honey, without being forced to destroy his best colonies and in one instant annihilate the work of an entire year.
Germany has Dzierzon, Van Berlespoch, Pollmann, Vogel, and many others. Nor is this book to be a scientific monograph on Apis Mellifica, Ligustica, Fasciata, Dorsata, etc., or a collection of new observations and studies. I shall say scarcely anything that those will not know who are somewhat familiar with bees.
Barely fifty years have passed since the foundation of rational, practical apiculture was rendered possible by means of the movable combs and frames devised by Dzierzon and Langstroth, and the hive ceased to be the inviolable abode wherein all came to pass in a mystery from which death alone stripped the veil.
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