12 Transactions of the Society. 



body, and that this influence may in some unknown indirect way 

 transfer to the drone some qualities of the male with which the 

 mother mated, and it certainly is evident that these spermatozoa 

 are not cells in the rest condition. They not only are in partial 

 movement, hut they are abundantly aerated, which seems at once 

 to prove that they absorb nutrition which they subsequently 

 oxidize, and that they as a consequence yield products which 

 must pass into the general blood-current. On the opposite side it 

 may be urged that facts known to entomologists would seem cer- 

 tainly to indicate that no such slight indirect influence derived 

 from copulation as is here suggested is necessary, for amongst 

 moths at least twenty generations of females have been produced 

 ■without a single male individual making its appearance. The 

 coming season will no doubt furnish some with an opportunity of 

 testing the question by inserting larv?e or the testes of drones 

 derived from fertile workers into queen cells. The marvellous 

 persistence of the spermatic cell is worthy of note in passing. One 

 taken fi'om a queen four years old is utterly indistinguishable from 

 another derived direct from the drone testis, although the former 

 must have existed in the queen's spermatheca the whole of her 

 life, less from five to ten days, between which ages queens almost 

 invariably mate. 



Let us now turn our attention to the wasp: opening the 

 abdomen of a hibernating queen as before by cutting down the 

 sides with fine scissors so as to avoid the nerve-track and dorsal 

 vessel, and lifting some of the plates, we shall find the viscera 

 covered densely by fatty masses ("corps graisseux"), which of 

 course furnish material for oxidation during the period of repose 

 and the earlier part of that of renewed activity. Wo may possibly 

 at once be struck by the vast differences in the proportions of the 

 several viscera of the two queens, the bee e. g. having small digestive 

 organs and large ovaries, the wasp small ovaries and large digestive 

 organs, for it would seem at first sight that the organs of reproduc- 

 tion should vary as those of assimilation. The explanation lies in 

 this. The queen bee very largely, if not wholly, depends upon 

 the worker for the production of the chyle, since the latter, more 

 especially during the time the former is rapidly ovij)Ositing, con- 

 stantly extends the tongue to supply from her own chyle stomach 

 food, the nitrogenous constituents of which have already been 

 brought into a condition of solution ; and indeed the queen 

 herself probably never digests normally tissue-forming material 

 (pollen). She does at intervals take honey from the cells of the 

 comb she may be perambulating, but since this honey consists 

 mostly of invert sugar abeady fitted for assimilation, it can hardly 

 be regarded as requiring digestion. Her work of self-nutrition is 

 thus almost wholly in the direction of absorption, and consequently 



