38 THE BEE keeper's MANUAL. 



hundreds of thousands of eggs. In precisely the same, 

 way, the mother wasps and hornets are fecundated. The 

 females alone of these insects survive the winter, and they 

 begin, single-handed, the construction of a nest, in which, 

 at first, only a few eggs are deposited. How could these 

 eggs hatch, if the females which laid them, had not been 

 impregnated, the previous season ? Dissection proves them 

 to have a spermalheca, similar to that of the Queen Bee. 



Of all who have written against Huber, no one has treat- 

 ed him with more unfairness, misrepresentation, and I might 

 almost add, malignity, than Huish. He maintains that the 

 eggs of the Queen are impregnated by the drones, after she 

 has deposited them in the cells, and accounts for the fact 

 that brood is produced in the Spring, long before the exist- 

 ence of any drones in the hive, by_ asserting that these eggs 

 were deposited and impregnated late in the previous season, 

 and have remained dormant, all winter, in the hive : and yet 

 the same, writer, while ridiculing the discoveries of Huber, 

 advises that all the mother wasps should be killed in the 

 Spring, to prevent them from founding families to commit 

 depredations upon the bees ! It never seems to have occur- 

 red to him, that the existence of a permanently impregnated 

 mother wasp, was just as difficult to be accounted for, as 

 the existence of a similarly impregnated Queen Bee. 



Effect of Retarded Impregnation on the Queen Bee. 



I shall now mention a fact in the physiology of the Queen 

 Bee, more singular than any which has yet been related. 



Huber, while experimenting to ascertain how the Queen 

 was fecundated, confined some of his young Queens to their 

 hives, by contracting the entrances, so that they were not 

 able to go in search of the drones, until three weeks after 



