28 HISTORY AND PHYSIOLOGY. 



hives, he totally confined the bees, on two oc- 

 casions, and still the eggs were prolific ; which 

 proves clearly that their fertility must have de- 

 pended upon the previous impregnation of the 

 queen. The analogy of wasps is indeed admitted, 

 by Huish, to discountenance the opinion which he 

 entertains in common with Maraldi and Debraw. 

 The queen wasp alone, survives the winter, and 

 deposits her first eggs in the ensuing spring in 

 combs of her own construction. Here then im- 

 pregnation must have taken place in the preceding 

 autumn, whilst the eggs were in the ovaria. It 

 was the opinion of Hattorf, Schirach, and probably 

 also of Bonner, that the queen-bee impregnated 

 herself ; but this opinion is too extravagant to re- 

 quire serious refutation : it arose probably, from 

 their making experiments upon queens taken in- 

 discriminately from the hives, and which had 

 previously been impregnated. This no doubt 

 misled Debraw, who, without knowing it, had 

 chosen for experiment some queens that had had 

 commerce with the males. The experiments of 

 Huber were made upon virgin-queens, with whose 

 history he was acquainted from the moment of 

 their leaving their cells. In the course of his 

 experiments he found that the queens were never 

 impregnated, so long as they remained in the 

 interior of the hive ; but that impregnation always 

 takes place in the open air, at a time when the 



