26 s THE BEE-KEEPER’S MANUAL. 
and mainly owing to the researches of the cae 
famous Dzierzon. It has long been known that a 
unfertile queen will frequently lay eggs, but that ae 
egos invariably hatch into drones. This fact—now 
recognised by the term parthenogenesis, or virgin 
breeding—is in itself sufficiently marvellous, as fur- 
nishing an instance in which life can be imparted by 
the mother alone, and showing that the male sex of 
bees require no male side in their parentage. Still it 
remained an enigma how the queen could lay both 
drone and worker eggs after her fertilisation had once 
been accomplished, and moreover how the respective 
sexes should uniformly be hatched from the cells 
designed by the workers for each. Observation abun- 
dantly proved that the same queen laid eggs in drone 
and in worker cells, that those laid in the former did 
really develop into drones, and that she often shifted 
about in her laying, from drone to worker or from 
worker to drone, just as the cells happened to fall in 
her way. 
Both the queen herself and her eggs had to undergo 
rigorous microscopic examination before the key to 
this mystery was found. The reproductive organs of 
the queen are arranged in this manner. She pos- 
sesses two ovaries or egg-bags, and proceeding there- 
from are the oviducts or egg-passages, which presently 
unite in the form of a letter Y. Placed upon, and 
opening into the united passage, there is a small 
round vessel called the spermatheca (seed-case), and 
this vessel was found, in the case of a fertile queen, to 
be filled with the same fluid as was met with in the 
male organs of the drones, while with an unfertile 
