146 THE LIFE OF THE BEE 



spirit of her people. But she is still a virgin. To become 

 as was the mother before her, it is essential that she should 

 meet the male within the first twenty days of her life. 

 Should the event for some reason be delayed beyond this 

 period, her virginity becomes irrevocable. And yet we have 

 seen that she is not sterile, virgin though she be. There 

 confronts us here the great mystery — or precaution — of nature, 

 that is known as parthenogenesis, and is common to a certain 

 number of insects, such as the aphides, the lepidoptera of the 

 Psyche genus, the hymenoptera of the Cynipede family, &c. 

 The virgin queen is able to lay, but from all the eggs that 

 she will deposit in the cells, be these large or small, there 

 will issue males alone ; and as these never work, as they 

 live at the expense of the females, as they never go foraging 

 except on their own account, and are generally incapable 

 of providing for their subsistence, the result will be, at 

 the end of some weeks, that the last exhausted worker will 

 perish, and the colony be ruined and totally annihilated. The 

 queen, we have said, will produce thousands of drones, 

 and each of these will possess millions of the spermatozoa 

 whereof it is impossible that a single one can have penetrated 

 into the organism of the mother. That may not be more 

 astounding, perhaps, than a thousand other and analogous 

 phenomena ; and indeed, when we consider these problems, 

 and more especially those of generation, the marvellous and 

 the unexpected confront us so constantly — occurring far more 

 frequently, and above all in far less human fashion, than in the 

 most miraculous fairy stories — that after a time astonishment 

 becomes so habitual with us, that we almost cease to wonder. 

 The fact, however, is sufficiently curious to be worthy of notice. 



