PERFECT SOCIETIES OF INSECTS. 401) 



solely ; and it is only after this period that an uninterrupted laying of 

 male eggs commences. But when it has been retarded, after the same 

 number of hours she begins laying male eggs, and continues to produce 

 these alone during her whole life. From hence it should seem to follow 

 that the former kind of eggs are first in the oviducts, and if impregnation 

 be not effected within a given time, that all the worker embryos perish. 

 Yet how this can take place with respect to those that in a fertile queen 

 should succeed the laying of male eggs, or be produced in the second 

 year of her life, seems difficult to conceive ; — or how the male embryos 

 escape this fate, which destroys all the female, both those that are to 

 precede them and those that are to follow them. Is it impossible that the 

 sex of the embryo may be determined by the period at which the aura 

 seminalis vivified it, and by the state of the ovary at that time ? In one 

 state of the ovary this principle may cause the embryos to become workers, 

 in another males. And something of this kind perhaps may be the cause 

 of hermaphrodites in other animals. But this I give merely as conjec- 

 ture' : the truth seems enveloped in mystery that we cannot yet penetrate. 

 Huber is of opinion that a single impregnation fertilizes all the eggs that 

 a queen will produce during her whole life, which is sometimes more than 

 two years." But of this enough. 



I said that forty-six hours after impregnation the queen begins laying 

 worker eggs ; — this is not, however, invariable. When her impregnation 

 takes place late in the year, she does not begin laying till the following 

 spring. Schirach asserts, that in one season a single female will lay from 

 70,000 to 100,000 eggs.^ Reaumur says, that upon an average she lays 

 about two hundred in a day, a moderate swarm consisting of 12,000, 

 which are laid in two months ; and Huber, that she lays above a hundred. 

 All these statements, the observations being made in different climates, 

 and perhaps under different circumstances, may be true. The laying of 

 worker eggs begins in February, sometimes so early as January.^ After 

 this, in the spring, the great laying of male eggs commences, lasting thirty 

 days ; in which time about 2000 of these eggs are laid. Another laying 

 of them, but less considerable, takes place in autumn. In the season of 

 oviposition, the queen may be discerned traversing the combs in all direc- 

 tions with a slow step, and seeking for cells proper to receive her eggs. 

 As she walks she keeps her head inclined, and seems to examine, one by 

 one, all the cells she meets with. When she finds one to her purpose, 

 she immediately gives to her abdomen the curve necessary to enable it to 

 reach the orifice of the cell, and to introduce it within it. The eggs are 

 set in the angle of the pyramidal bottom of the cell, or in one of the 

 hollows formed by the conflux of the sides of the rhombs, and being 

 besmeared with a kind of gluten, stand upright. If, however, it be a 

 female that lays only male eggs, they are deposited upon the lowest of 

 the sides of the cell, as she is unable to reach the bottom.^ 



' This conjecture receives strong confirmation from the following observations of Sir E. 

 Home, which I met with since it came into my mind. From the nipples present in man, 

 which sometimes even afford milk, and from the general analogy between the male and 

 female organs of generation, he supposes the germ is originally fiued to become either sex ; 

 and that which it shall be is determined at the time of impregnation by some unknown 

 cause.— P/jJ/os. Trans., 1799, 157. 



i i. 106—. ^ Schirach, 7. 13. 



< Schirach, 13. Thorley, 105. • * Bonnet, x. 258. 8vo. ed. 



35 



