PERFECT SOCIETIES OF INi3ECTS. 159 



should seem to follow, that the former kind of eggs are 

 first in the oviducts, and, if impregnation be not ef- 

 fected 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 em- 

 bryos escape this fate, which destroys all the females, 

 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 determined by the period at which the 

 aura seminalis vivifies 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 hermaphrodites in other animals. But 

 this I give merely as conjecture^: the truth seems 

 enveloped in mystery that we cannot yet penetrate. 

 Huber is of opinion that a single impregnation ferti- 

 lizes 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, how- 

 ever, invariable. When her impregnation takes place 

 late in the year, she does not begin laying till the fol- 



' This conjecture receives strong confirmation from the following ob- 

 servations of the celebrated John Hunter, which I met with since it came 

 into my mind. From the nipples present in man, which sometimes even 

 afford milk, and from the general analogy between the male and female 

 organs of generation, he supposes the germ is originally fitted to become 

 either sex; and that which it shall be is determined at the lime of impreg- 

 nation by some unknown cause. '' i. lOO — 



