5(3 PHYSIOLOCiV OF Tilt: HONEY-BEE. 



■which were not yet developed in her ovaries. Years ago, the 

 celebrated Dr. John Hunter (1792), and others, supposed that 

 there must be a permanent receptacle for the male sperm, 

 oi)ening' into the oviduct. Dzierzon, who must be regarded 

 as one of the ablest contributors of modern times to apiarian 

 science, maintained this opinion, and stated that he had 

 found such a receptacle filled with a fluid resembling the 

 semen of the drones. He does not seem to have then demon- 

 strated his discoveries by any miscroscopic examinations. 



128. In the Winter of 1851-2, the writer submitted for 

 scientific examination several queen-bees to Dr. Joseph Leidy, 

 of Philadelphia, Avho had the highest reputation both at home 

 and abroad, as a naturalist and miscroscopic anatomist. He 

 found, in making his dissections, a small globular sac, about 

 1-38 of an inch in diameter, communicating with the oviduct, 

 and filled with a Avhitish fluid; this fluid, when examined un- 

 der the miscroscope, abounded in the spermatozoids, the living 

 germs which characterize the seminal fluid. A comparison of 

 this substance, later in the season, with the semen of a drone, 

 proved them to be exact!}' alike. Prof. Siebold, in 1843, 

 examined the spermatheca of the queen-bee, and found it 

 after copulation, filled with the seminal fluid of the drone. 

 At that time, Apiarists paid no attention to his views, but 

 considered them, as he says, to be only ^^theoretical stuff J' It 

 seems, then, that Prof. Leidy's dissection was not, as we had 

 hitherto supposed, the first, of an impregnated spermatheca. 



129. These examinations have settled, on the impregnable 

 basis of demonstration, the mode in which the eggs of the 

 queen are fecundated. In descending the oviduct to be de- 

 posited in the cells, they pass by the mouth of this seminal 

 sac, or "spermatheca" and receive a portion of its fertilizing- 

 contents. Small as it is, it contains sufficient to impregnate 

 millions of eggs. In precisely the same way, the mother- 

 wasps and hornets are fecundated. The females only of 

 these insects survive the Winter, and often a single one begins 

 the construction of a nest, in which at first only a few eggs 

 are deposited. How could these eggs hatch, if the females 



