The chemical nature of royal jelly

MOST chemical investigations of substances important in nutrition have dealt with foods used by mammals.The work to be reported is an attempt to deter- mine the chemical nature of the components of royal jelly, the peculiar nutriment which is fed to queen bees by their subjects throughout life.Royal jelly is a thick, milky material which is generally believed to be a secretion of the pharyn: geal glands of the nurse bees (young workers).For a proper appreciation of the nutritional significance of royal jelly the following facts about the natural history of bees should be recalled.,A colony of bees consists of one queen, several hundred drones or males and from 25,000 to 100,000 worker bees, sexually undeveloped females.This large number of workers are all the daughters of one queen.As the bees die off constantly the queen may, during the whole season, become the mother of a quarter of a million bees.At the height of the season, queens have been known to lay more than 2000 eggs (over their own weight in eggs) in one day.Such fecundity must be associated with a very active metabolism and the nature of the food which makes this possible is of interest.But of greater nutritional significance is ihe fact that the anatomical and physiological differentiation of the female larvae is dependent upon the nature of their diet.Two types of eggs.are laid by the queen: (1) unfertilized eggs which give rise only to drones (male bees), and (2) fertile eggs which give rise to females, either workers (sexually immature females) or queens.By grafting young larvae, it has been proven