130 J. HUNTER ON THE QUEEN BEE. 



her trij) be fortunate, and she meets a drone, they fall together to the 

 ground, where separation quickly takes place, at once fatal to the 

 drone, who parts with his sexual organs, which remain attached to 

 the queen on her arrival home ; these quickly shrivel up, and are 

 removed by the workers. In the act of coition the spermatheca of 

 the queen is injected with the seminal fluid, and, wonderful to relate, 

 this small vessel whose external measurement is but -— of an inch, 

 contains sufficient material to fertilize all the eggs which the queen 

 may lay in her whole life (for she mates but once), although she 

 may live four or five years, and deposit during this time more than 

 a million eggs. Dzierzon, a highly scientific German bee-master, 

 says, " Most queens in spacious hives at a favourable season, lay 

 60,000 eggs in a month, and a specially fertile queen in four years, 

 which she on an average lives, lays over 1,000,000 eggs." On this 

 authority I make this statement, and I do not think it is an exag- 

 geration. Referring back to my text that " the act of fertilization 

 [of the eggs] or not — determines the sex of the future bee," you 

 may naturally ask how I prove this statement, or that the unfertilized 

 eggs will hatch at all. Professor von Siebold made many most 

 skilful microscopical dissections of eggs, and he affirms that among 

 52 eggs taken from worker cells examined by him, with the greatest 

 care and conscientiousness, 34 furnished a positive result, namely, 

 the existence of seminal filaments, in which movements could even 

 be detected in three eggs, and among 27 eggs from drone cells 

 examined with the same care and by the same method, he did not 

 find one single seminal filament in any egg, either internally or ex- 

 ternally. A phenomenon sometimes occurs in a beehive of a queen 

 laying eggs that produce males only ; this for ages had puzzled 

 philosophers, without any satisfactory solution, but if you will bear 

 in mind what I have said, and admit it as fact, the solution is easy. 

 The theory of Parthenogenises (or virgin breeding) which Dzierzon 

 promulgated in 1845, is said to have explained this phenomenon of 

 the beehive as perfectly as the Copernican hypothesis the phenomena 

 of the heavens. The principal points to bear in mind are — that 

 the queen to be able to breed workers must be fertilized by the 

 drone, and that the union takes place only in the air — that drone 

 eggs do not require fecundation, but that the co-operation of the 

 drone is absolutely necessary when worker bees are to be produced — 

 that in mating the ovaries are not fecundated, but the seminal 

 receptacle (the spermatheca) and that the supply of semen thus re- 



