Ɛpsilon

To Cottage Gardener   [after 8 May 1860]1

[Down]

– “A Devonshire Bee-keeper” states (page 94) that he caught

a common drone entering one of his hives of the pure Ligurian stock.2 Will he have the kindness to state at what distance in a straight line there are hives of the common bee? I believe it is not known how far the drones commonly wander from their own hive. Andrew Knight believed, as stated in the “Philosophical Transactions,” that the queen was seldom fertilised by her own blood-relations, the drones of her own hive.3 Does “A Devonshire Bee-keeper,” who seems to be so conversant with the habits of bees, believe in this doctrine of Andrew Knight?— 4

C. D.

1
The letter is a reply to a note published on 8 May 1860 in the Cottage Gardener 24 (1860): 94. CD’s letter appeared in the issue of 29 May. There is an undated draft of this letter in the Fitzwilliam Museum library, Cambridge.
2
The article, signed ‘A Devonshire bee-keeper’, was published in the Cottage Gardener on 8 May 1860 (see n. 1, above). The author stated that two out of his four Ligurian queens appeared to be hybrids and that he had seen an ordinary drone entering the hive of his Ligurian bees.
3
Knight 1828, p. 307. See also letter to W. B. Tegetmeier, 17 April [1860].
4
In a reply, dated 24 May, that immediately followed CD’s query, ‘the Devonshire bee-keeper’ reported that he now believed the ‘unwelcome stranger’ to have been a ‘small hybrid drone’ rather than ‘a straggler from some other colony.’ On other evidence, he inferred that drones extended their flight to a greater distance than was generally imagined. Nevertheless, he believed that females were ‘very generally fertilised by the offspring of the same mother’ (Cottage Gardener 24 (1860): 143).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-2777,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-2777