THE BRIDE-WIDOW 121 
details of her common everyday life that succeed 
this tense period, above all in the wonderful 
structure of her body and its functions, there is 
greater romance still. That she has but a single 
commerce with the drone, and thereafter is exalted 
to perpetual fecundity; that, through her, sons 
and daughters can be given to the hive in just the 
proportion needed for the good of the State, or 
that increase of population can be wholly arrested 
at will, are facts to be accredited only after sure 
knowledge. And to understand how these results 
are brought about, it is necessary to learn some- 
thing of the anatomy, as well as the manner of 
fecundation, of the mother-bee. 
In the first place, as fertilisation of the one sex 
by the other is usually regarded, the queen-bee is 
not fertilised at all. The vital essence of the 
drone does not penetrate the ovaries of the queen, 
but passes immediately after coition into a re- 
ceptacle specially provided for it, where it is stored, 
and its effectiveness preserved, during nearly the 
whole lifetime of the queen. It has been shown 
that the virgin queen is able to lay eggs from 
which only drones, or male bees, originate. The 
fecundated queen, however, can lay both male and 
female eggs, and she has the power of depositing 
either kind when and wherever she wills. The 
whole thing, amazing as it is, and far-reaching in 
its results, has, like many other extraordinary 
devices in nature, a simple explanation. The 
