548 Mr. John Lowe’s Observations on 
The principal points of this theory may be shortly 
expressed thus:—Ist. That the queen (female bee), to 
become good for anything, must be fertilized by a 
drone (the male), and that the copulation takes place 
only 1 in the air; that drone-eges do not require fecunda- 
tion, but that the co-oper ation of the drone is absolutely 
necessary when worker-bees are to be produced. That 
“in copulation the ovaries are not fecundated, but the 
seminal receptacle, that little vesicle or knot which, m 
the young queen, is filled with a watery moisture, is 
saturated with semen, after which it is more clearly dis- 
tinguishable from its white colour.” That the supply of 
semen received during copulation is sufficient for her 
whole lifetime. The copulation takes place once for all, 
and (as already stated) only in the open air; therefore, 
no queen which has been lame in her wings from birth, 
can ever be perfectly fertile—that is, capable of pro- 
ducing both sexes—as copulation never takes place in the 
interior of the hive. This (Dzierzon says) ‘is exactly the 
new and peculiar point in my theory, which I at first 
only ventured to put forward as a hypothesis, but which 
has since been completely confirmed.” 
“The power of the fertile queen, accordingly, to lay 
worker or drone eges at pleasure (he goes on to say), is 
rendered very easy of explanation, by the fact that the 
drone-egg’s require no impregnation, but bring the germ 
of life with them out of the ovary; whilst, otherwise, it 
would be inexplicable and incredible. Thus the queen 
has it in her power to deposit an egg just as 1t comes 
from the ovary, and as the unfecundated mothers lay it ; 
or by the action of the seminal receptacle, past which it 
must glide, to invest it with a higher degree—a higher 
potency—of fertility, and awaken in it the germ ofa more 
perfect being, namely, a queen or a worker-bee.” 
2nd. The second and most important point in 
Dzierzon’s theory is, that “all eggs which come to ma- 
turity in the two ovaries of a queen-bee are only of one 
and the same kind, which, when they are laid without 
coming in contact with the male semen, become deve- 
loped into male bees, but, on the contrary, when they 
are fertilized by male semen, produce female bees.” 
This important proposition, it will be seen, strikes at 
the root of, and completely abolishes, as Von Siebold ex- 
presses it, a “ time-honoured physiological law,” namely, 
“that an egg which is to be developed into a male or 
