Source of Secretion

Abstract

Following the discovery that worker bees laden with wax scales had not gathered them from flowers but had probably secreted them (Hornbostel, 1744), the first attempts to define the origin of the presumptive wax were those of Hunter (1792), who postulated it to be an oily secretion of bees. Later, Huber (1814) described the external morphology of the worker abdomen and depicted it quite adequately despite his confusion over segmentation. He observed that wax scales have the same pentagonal shape as the surface of the cuticle, the so-called wax mirrors, on which they form (Fig. 3.1) and tried to identify the origin of the liquid secretion through dissection of bees. Although he undoubtedly located the epithelium underlying the wax mirrors, he failed to find any channels connecting these cells to the exterior surface and so surmised that the wax was ‘sweated out’, a problem to which we shall return shortly.