44 PARTHENOGENESIS 



caressing or by mere agitation ; whether the copulation between 

 the queen and a drone does not after all take place in the bee- 

 hive, and more of the same kind. 



In opposition to these variously contradictory questions, I, 

 as Vice-president of the third meeting of German Bee-keepers, 

 held on the 2nd June, 1852, at Brieg in Silesia*, gave an 

 exposition of the anatomical relations of the three kinds of Bees, 

 the drones, the queen, and the workers, and called upon the 

 Bee-keepers present to express their objections and doubts 

 against the particular points of the theory established by Dzier- 

 zon. This was done on several sides ; Dzierzon, who was present 

 as President of the Society, defended his assertions with the 

 means which his abundant observations, conceived with a correct 

 understanding, furnished to his hand, whilst I came to his assist- 

 ance with my observations made with the dissecting needle and 

 the microscope, whenever reference was made to the different 

 anatomical relations and the signification of the internal and 

 external sexual organs of the Bees. 



Although the majority of the Apiarians did not so quickly 

 drop their preconceived notions and incorrect views as to the 

 oeconomy, and especially the reproduction, of the Bees, yet a 

 constantly increasing number of voices was gradually raised in 

 the Bienenzeitung to confirm the correctness of individual points 

 in the theory of reproduction put forward by Dzierzon. People 

 began to interest themselves in the anatomical structure of the 

 Bees and of insects in general ; they took notice of the know- 

 ledge obtained in recent times by the microscope, by which a 

 clearer view of the function of the male seminal fluid in the in- 

 terior of female insects had been gained. To strip everything 

 doubtful from those assertions in Dzierzon's theory which still 

 had too much of the garb of a hypothesis about them, and allow 

 them to appear as naked truths, those Apiarians, whose sole 

 object was to get at the truth, took care that various individual 

 Bees, the exact examination of whose condition might furnish 

 the right explanation of different doubtful points in Dzierzon's 

 theory, were handed over to practised entomotomists for a dis- 

 section and opinion. In this way this theory constantly gained 

 in firmness and form, and became strengthened in such a 

 * See the Bienenzeitung,, Achter Jahrgang, 1852, p. 117. 



