THE SEXES OF EGGS. 15 



miracle if there were a positive reversal of sex. It seems 

 to me also that the prolongation of life in the queen hee 

 may not be the direct consequence of the full development 

 of her sex, but may arise from it in a secondary manner — 

 vi2., from her exemption from outdoor labour. Worker- 

 bees, -when confined to the hive during winter, live five or 

 six times as long as in the summer; and it appears, there- 

 fore, not improbable that, if proper means were adopted, the 

 lives of fertile workers, which, I beheve, nevet leave home, 

 might be prolonged until they equalled those of queens." 



From the same letter I will make one more short quota- 

 tion. Mr W. says : " A young and prolific queen of the 

 current year, in the fuU flow of working egg-laying, can 

 scarcely be induced, under any circumstances, to deposit 

 drone-e^s, but year by year she gets to lay them with 

 greater and ever-iacreasing facility, tiU in extreme old age 

 she may become incapable of laying any others. To my 

 poor comprehension it seems perfectly impossible to re- 

 concile these facts with your theory, that her eggs are 

 throughout aU of one kind, convertible by the workers 

 into either sex." 



Mr "Woodbury's last letter of this correspondence goes 

 deeper into the subject than any of the former ones. It 

 grapples with the physiology of the question. The reader, 

 it is believed, wiU be greatly interested in perusing the 

 following quotation : — 



" The ovaries of a queen bee are never impregnated, the 

 semen being stored in a distinct vesicle called the sper- 

 matheca, a portion of the contents of which is either com- 

 municated to, or withheld from, every egg as it passes 

 through the oviduct — and this difference determiues the 

 sex. Every egg which received a portion of the contents 

 of the spermatheca becomes a female, either perfect or 

 imperfect ; every egg which passes unfecundated can hatch 



