S74 PERFECT SOCIETIES OF INSECTS. 



station, and can tolerate another to discharge tliem in her room. When 

 we consider how much virgin queens are blighted by their subjects, we 

 may suppose that nature urges them to take the opportunity of the first 

 warm day, when the males tiy forth, to pair with one of them. 



When fecundation has not been retarded, fort}-six hours after it has 

 taken place the queen begins to lay eggs that will produce workers, and 

 continues for the subsequent eleven months, more or less, to lay them 

 solely; and it is only after this period that an uninterrupted laying of male 

 eggs commences. But when it has been retarded, after the same number 

 of hours she begins laying male eggs, and continues to produce these alone 

 during her Avhole life. From hence it should seem to follow that the 

 former kind of eggs are first in the oviducts, and if impregnation be not 

 effected within a given time, that all the worker embryos perish. Yet how 

 this can take place with respect to those that in a fertile queen should 

 succeed the laying of male eggs, or be produced in the second year of her 

 life, seems difficult to conceive; — or how the male embryos escape this 

 fate, which destroys all the female, both those that are to precede them 

 and those that are to follow them. Is it impossible that the sex of the 

 embryo may be deterniiiied b}' the period at which the aura sembialis vivi- 

 fies it, and by the state of the ovary at that time? In one state of the 

 ovary this principle may cause the embryos to become workers, in another 

 males. And something of this kind perhaps may be the cause of herma- 

 phrodites in other animals. But this I give merely as conjecture^ : the 

 trutli seems enveloped in mystery that we cannot yet penetrate. Huber 

 is of opinion that a single impregnation fertilises all the eggs that a queen 

 will produce during her whole life, which is sometimes more than two 

 years.^ But of this enough. 



I said that forty-six hours after impregnation the queen begins laying 

 worker eggs; — this is not, however, invariable. When her impregnation 

 takes place late in the year, she does not begin laying tid the following 

 spring. Schirach asserts, that in one season a single female will lay from 

 70,000 to 100,000 eggs.^ Reaumur says, that upon an average she lays 

 about two hundred in a day, a moderate swarm consisting of 12,000, which , 

 are laid in tv/o months ; and Huber, that she lays above a hundred. All 

 these statements, the observations being made in different climates, and 

 periiaps under different circumstances, may be true. The laying of worker 

 eggs begins in February, sometimes so early as January.* After this, m 

 the spring, the great laying of male eggs commences, lasiing thirty days; in 

 which time about 2000 of these eggs are laid. Another laying of them, 

 but less considerable, takes place in autumn. In the season of oviposition, 

 the queen may be discerned traversing the combs in all directions with a 

 slow step, and seeking for cells proper to receive her eggs. As she 

 walks she keeps her head inclined, and seems to examine, one by one, all 

 the cells she meets with. When she finds one to her purpose, she imme- 



1 This conjecture receives strong confiimation from the foUowinjj observations of 

 Sir E. Home, wbicii I met with smce it came into my mind, i'rom tlie nipples 

 present in man, which sometimes even afford milk, and from the general analogy 

 between the male and female organs of generation, lie supposes the germ is ori- 

 ginally titted to become either sex; and that which it shall be is determined at 

 tiie time of impregnation by some unknown cause. — Philos. Trans., 1791), 157. 



2 i. 106—. 5 Schirach, 7. 13. 

 * Schirach, 13. Thorley, 105. 



