66 PARTHENOGENESIS 



was communicated by me privately to President Busch for his 

 opinion, as I could not then form any definite opinion for my- 

 self, not knowing with certainty that the vesicle is the recepta- 

 culum seminis, and the white slime (its contents) the sperma 

 virile. Busch, however, was also unable to form an opinion ; 

 my servant Gunther on the contrary thought, that perhaps the 

 receptaculum had been crushed and destroyed. This, however, 

 I regard as extremely improbable, as the crushing of the recep- 

 tacle, which is generally very firm, between the soft surrounding 

 parts of the body of the queen, without quickly leading to the 

 death of the latter herself, is scarcely possible ; I believe, there- 

 fore, that it was only that the organs which may act in opening 

 and closing the orifice, or in retracting and advancing the re- 

 ceptacle, were lamed, stiffened," &c. 



If I am to express my opinion upon this interesting case, 

 I suppose that by the pinching of the abdomen the seminal re- 

 ceptacle of the queen, filled with semen, was torn away from the 

 oviduct at its opening point, by which the queen, thus injured, 

 was no longer enabled to fertilize her eggs during deposition, 

 and therefore could only lay unfertilized and consequently male 

 eggs. 



Berlepsch reports as follows* upon another experiment con- 

 firmatory of Dzierzon's principal point, which he made in con- 

 sequence of studying J. Muller's Physiologie des Menschen : 

 "Now only did I obtain a full conviction of the existence of 

 the spermatozoa ; and when I read in the above-mentioned work 

 (bd. ii. p. 636) that high and loiv temperatures cause the move- 

 ments of the spermatozoa to cease, I thought to myself: Now you 

 have the complete explanation of Dzierzon's casef; and if it be 

 true that in Apis mellifica the male eggs regularly develope 

 themselves spontaneously into males, but are only converted 

 into female eggs by the fecundation of the spermatozoa, every 

 normally fruitful queen must cease to lay female eggs, from the 

 moment when we succeed in rendering the spermatozoa motion- 



* See his letter quoted above, p. 61. 



f Berlepsch here refers to the case communicated by Dzierzon (Bienen- 

 zeitung, 1854, p. 252. 2), that a queen which had been frozen for a long time, 

 after being again brought to life by warmth, only laid male eggs, whilst pre- 

 viously she had also laid female eggs. 



