§ X.] RELATION OF SEX TO CELLS. 69 



demolished this mechanical explanation ; and as some 

 recent writers have quoted the "Wagner theory" with 

 approval, it may be best to give the German observer's 

 principal objections in his own words : — 



" This explanation is thoroughly untenable ; for — 

 (a) perfectly new worker cells are fully as wide as very 

 old drone cells in which breeding has taken place many 

 times, and yet, as found by experience, female bees come 

 from the former and males from the latter, (b) Many 

 queens are of a strikingly slender form, some of them 

 occasionally so small that they can scarcely be distin- 

 guished from workers, and yet they have no proclivity 

 to drone-laying — which must however have been the 

 case if the narrow cell effected the fertilisation of the 

 egg by pressure. . . . (^) A queen lays even in cells 

 that are scarcely begun, with which, therefore, the pro- 

 portion of the diameter to the thickness of her body can 

 exercise no influence at all, and yet drones come forth 

 from the drone cells and workers from the worker cells. 

 (,d) If there are no drone cells at her command, and the 

 stock is in want of drones, the queen lays male eggs in 

 worker cells, and drones hatch from them. . . . (/) A 

 fertile queen, if introduced with her colony into a hive 

 containing nothing but drone comb, would naturally {on 

 such hypothesis] furnish the drone cells with eggs as she 

 would worker cells, and make no difficulty about it. But ' 

 she does make a very great difficulty — for a long time 

 she lays no eggs in the cells at all, but lets them drop, or 



