Huber's New Observations on the Natural History of Bees

[Michael Bush]

FYI if you'd like to read "New Observations on the Natural History of Bees" by François Huber 1806 edition, I have the entire text available on my web site:

http://www.bushfarms.com/huber.htm

[FordGuy]

Mr. Bush (i'm smiling when I wriete this) without disparaging in any way Mr. Huber, is there some unusually keen insight in his writings which would justify wading through his Olde English way of writing?

[Michael Bush]

>Mr. Bush (i'm smiling when I wriete this) without disparaging in any way Mr. Huber, is there some unusually keen insight in his writings which would justify wading through his Olde English way of writing?

Hmmm...  Huber was Swiss, and never, that I know of, wrote anything in English, but it was translated in 1806 so it is in moderately old English.  It's a walk in the park next to the King James Bible or Shakespeare or Chaucer.  The reason I published it on my website is partly because the only other online copy I know of is an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) of the original which has "f"s for all the "S"s (another old English custom) and too many mistakes to be able to easily read or search on it.

Insights?  Most everything useful that we now know about bees he either proved or discovered outright.  But of the things we have forgotten there is much.  From the spacing of natural brood comb at 1 1/4" instead of the 1 3/8" we now use to the capping and emergence times that are 18 1/2" days instead of the currently held 21 days.

"The leaf or book hive consists of twelve vertical frames… and their breadth fifteen lines (one line= 1/12 of an inch. 15 lines = 1 ¼” or 32mm). It is necessary that this last measure should be accurate;"
François Huber 1806

“The worm of workers passes three days in the egg, five in the vermicular state, and then the bees close up its cell with a wax covering.  The worm now begins spinning its cocoon, in which operation thirty-six hours are consumed.  In three days, it changes to a nymph, and passes six days in this form.  It is only on the twentieth day of its existence, counting from the moment the egg is laid, that it attains the fly state.” FRANCIS HUBER 4 September 1791.

On the first day, of course 0 days have transpired and on the 20th day 19 days have transpired.  If you add up all of his times it comes to 18 1/2 days from egg to emergence for a worker bee.  This is very significant in light of our currently held theory that it takes 21 days, which of course is true on 5.4mm comb, but not on natural sized comb.

He discovered that the queen mates in flight outside the hive.  That she only mates on one occasion in her life.  That the drone loses his parts in the process.  That queenless hives never drive out the drones.  That the old queen leaves with the first swarm of the season.  That the queen "pipes".  That afterswarms are always lead by virgin queens.  What the temperature is in the hive.  How far the foragers fly.  How queens fight.  How to get bees to accept a new queen.  That unfertilized queens lay drones.  That workers can lay drones.  He proved that queens develop from worker eggs.  That the food makes them a queen instead of a worker.  He invented the movable frame hive (not Langstroth).  He was the first to suggest that artificial insemination was possible.

He explains not only what he discovered but also how he proved it.  You cannot only learn about bees, but critical thinking and the scientific method.

Huber, not Langstroth, was the father of modern beekeeping.

Did I mention that Huber was blind?

[bassman1977]

Did I mention that Huber was blind?

Wow!  Gotta check that out.

[FordGuy]

Amazing!  And don't hold that against me, just a little humor (or an attempt at it)....

[bill]

micheal you are indeed a scholar

[bill]

MIcheal, I am on chapter ten and will stop for tonight. huber just said that bees when they are agitated perspire. do you know if they actually do? This a great book. thanx a lot for making it available. I am also making a vocabulary list, he has quite a vocabulary.

[manowar422]

Michael,
Thanks for making this availible to us :D
I'll have to read these letters more than a couple of times to absorb it all, but it's time well spent.
Having finished letter #10, I was impressed by the following paragraph as it relates to cell size affecting the developing size of males.
I do so regret that his findings published here was not proven to have the same effect on worker bees. :(


The effect: produced on the size of drones by the size of the cells their worms inhabit, may serve as a rule for what should happen to the larvae of workers in the same circumstances.  The large cells of males are sufficiently capacious for the perfect expansion of their organs.  Thus, although reared in cells of still greater capacity, they will grow no larger than common drones.  We have had evidence of this in those produced by queens whose fecundation has been retarded. You will remember, Sir, that they sometimes lay male eggs in the royal cells.  Now, the males proceeding from them, and reared in cells much more spacious than nature has appropriated for them, are no larger than common males.  Therefore it is certain, that whatever be the size of the cells where the worms acquire their increment, the bees will attain no greater size than is peculiar to their species.  But if, in their primary form, they live in cells smaller than they should be, as their growth will be checked, they will not attain the usual size, of which there is proof in the following experiment.  I had a comb consisting of the cells of large drones, and one with those of workers, which also served for the male worms.  Of these, my assistant took a certain number from the smallest cells, and deposited them on a quantity of food purposely prepared in the large ones; and in return he introduced into the small cells the worms that had been hatched in the other, and then committed both to the care of the workers in a hive where the queen laid the eggs of males only.  The bees were not affected by this change; they took equal care of the worms; and when the period of metamorphosis arrived, gave both kinds that convex covering usually put on those of the males.  Eight days afterwards, we removed the combs, and found, as I had expected, nymphs of large males in the large cells, and those of small males in the small ones.

[Michael Bush]

>huber just said that bees when they are agitated perspire. do you know if they actually do?

If bees get very hot you will find them wet and sticky.  I believe this is from regurgitation, not presperation.  But he did find them wet then they got hot and called it that.

>Having finished letter #10, I was impressed by the following paragraph as it relates to cell size affecting the developing size of males.
I do so regret that his findings published here was not proven to have the same effect on worker bees.  

No foundation existed at the time.  Huber had no way to do what Baudoux did later, which was to use different sized foundation to get sizes from 4.6mm to 5.8mm or so and get various sized workers.  All Huber had to work with was natural drone comb and worker comb.  He put the worker eggs in drone comb and the workers cleared them out instead of rasing them.  This failed to prove anything, actually, except that the bees refuse to raise workers in drone cells.  :)  Since drone cells seem to run about 6.6mm this is not surprising.  They do the same when they find drone eggs in worker cells from laying workers or infertile queens.  They usually try to clear them out and only when they are overwelmed by them do any hatch.

Baudoux started with Hubers observations on the different sized drones to concluded that it was possible to do the same wth workers and get larger bees, which he sucessfully did.