THE QUEEN. 57 



had not been impregnated the previous season? Dissection 

 proves that they have a spermatheca similar to that of the 

 queen-bee. It never seems to have occurred to the opponents 

 of Huber, that the existence of a permanently-impregnated 

 mother-wasp is quite as difficult to be accounted for, as the 

 existence of a similarly impregnated queen-bee. 



130. The celebrated Swammerdam, in his observations 

 upon insects, made in the latter part of the seventeenth cen- 

 tury, has given a highly magnified drawing of the ovaries of 

 the queen-bee, a reduced copy of which we present (Plate 10) 

 to our readers. The small globular sac (D), communicating 

 with the oviduct (E-), which he thought secreted a fluid for 

 sticking the eggs to the base of the cells, is the seminal rieser- 

 voir, or spermatheca. Any one who will carefully dissect a 

 queen-bee, may see this sac, even with the naked eye. 



It will be seen that the ovaries {G and H) are double, each 

 consisting of an amazing number of ducts filled with eggs, 

 which gradually increase in size. Since the first edition of 

 this work was issued, we have ascertained that Posel (page 

 54) describes the oviduct of the queen, the spermatheca and 

 its contents, and the use of the latter in impregnating the 

 passing egg. His work was published at Munich, in 1784. It 

 seems also from his work ("A Complete Treatise of Forest 

 and Horticultural Bee-Culture," page 36), that before the 

 investigations of Huber, Jansha, the bee-keeper royal of 

 Maria Theresa, had discovered the fact that the young queens 

 leave their hive in search of the drones. 



131. Huber, while experimenting to ascertain how the 

 queen was fecundated, confined some young ones to their 

 hives by contracting the entrances, so that they were more 

 than three weeks old before they could go in search of the 

 drones. To his amazement, the queens whose impregnation 

 was thus retarded never laid any eggs but such as produced 

 drones ! 



He tried this experiment repeatedly, but always with the 

 same result. Bee-keepers, even from the time of Aristotle, had 

 observed that all the brood in a hive were occasionally drones. 



