IN THE HONEY-BEE. 67 



less (killing them) without destroying the mother herself. At 

 the end of June 1854, therefore, I took three very fruitful queens, 

 imprisoned each of them in a queen's cage, went to Miihlhausen 

 and placed the cages in the ice-cellar of an inn-keeper who was 

 a friend of mine. There I left them for about thirty-six hours. 

 The queens were of course completely benumbed, regularly 

 covered with hoar frost, and when I returned with them to 

 Seebach, I exposed them to the sun, which was just rising. For 

 a long time none of them stirred ; at last, towards seven o'clock, 

 I observed movements of the feet in one of them. By means 

 of a fine bit of w T ood I put a little honey upon her proboscis, and 

 in ten or twelve minutes more, she had again returned to life. 

 The two others on the contrary were dead. This appeared very 

 remarkable to me, as even worker-bees, whose vitality, however, 

 is very much weaker than that of the queens, generally survive 

 such a short freezing ; and the only reason I can find for it, is, 

 that the temperature of the ice-cellar was too low, and therefore 

 the queens were too much penetrated by the frost, if the circum- 

 stance that the queens were too heavy with eggs, and therefore 

 less able than at other times to bear external injurious influences 

 upon their bodies, may not have cooperated to produce death. 

 I returned the revived queen to her people. She laid, as before, 

 thousands of eggs, but from all of them only males were evolved. 

 When I subsequently examined the semen, I found it less con- 

 sistent and with a yellowish tinge." 



From this extremely interesting experiment, it follows evi- 

 dently that the male eggs of the Bees require no fertilization ; 

 the spermatozoids which this queen, exposed to such an intense 

 cold, contained in her seminal receptacle, were certainly be- 

 numbed, and did not again become capable of movement after 

 the thawing ; so that therefore this queen could only have laid 

 unfecundated eggs ; for even if she had emptied the contents of 

 her seminal receptacle over the eggs when laying them, in order 

 to fertilize them, the numbed spermatozoids would have remained 

 incapable of action. 



A third empirical proof, by which the principal point of 

 Dzierzon's theory of reproduction is supported, is furnished by 

 the phenomena which maybe observed in the production of mules 

 amongst Bees. Attention has only been directed to the pro- 



F 2 



