38 THE HIVE AND HONEY-BEE. 



small or worker-cells, and that she makes no mistakes. 

 Dzierzon inferred, therefore, that there was some way in 

 which she was able to decide the sex of the egg before it 

 was laid, and that she must have such a control over the 

 mouth of the seminal sac as to be able to extrude her 

 eggs, allowing them at will to receive or not a portion 

 of its fertilizing contents. In this way, he thought she 

 determined their sex, 'according to the size of the cells 

 in which she laid them. 



My friend, Mr. Samuel Wagner, of York, Pennsyl- 

 vania, has advanced a highly ingenious theory, which 

 accounts for all the facts, without admitting that the 

 queen has any special knowledge or will on the subject. 

 He supposes that when she deposits her eggs in the 

 worker-cells, her body is slightly compressed by their size, 

 thus causing the eggs as they pass the spermatheca to 

 receive its vivifying influence. On the contrary, when 

 she is laying in drone-cells, as this compression cannot 

 take place, the mouth of the spermatheca is kept closed, 

 and the eggs are necessarily unfecundated. 



In the Autumn of 1852, my assistant found a young 

 queen whose progeny consisted entirely of drones. The 

 colony had been formed by removing a few combs con- 

 taining bees, brood, and eggs, from another hive, and had 

 raised a new queen. Some eggs were found in one of the 

 combs, and young bees were already emerging from the 

 cells, all of which were drones. As there were none but 

 worker-cells in the hive, they were reared in them, and 

 not having space for full development, they were dwarfed 

 in size, although the bees had pieced the cells to give 

 more room to their occupants. 



I was not only surprised to find drones reared in worker- 

 cells, but equally so that a young queen, who at first lays 

 only the eggs of workers, should be laying drone-eggs ; 



